PHPBB spam literally drives webmaster batty
by Sapphire (March 1, 2006)
I’ve got a PHPBB forum on one of my sites, and it’s been getting spammed daily. I removed the memberlist a few days ago and made it so new accounts have to be manually approved by me: that stopped the profile spamming, where they just sign up to put their website on a page.
But someone was still making posts with links to their spam sites every few minutes. They were posting as guests, even though my forum permissions were set to require registration before you can post. I kept banning their IP’s, disallowing the names they were using, and pulling my hair out. I looked through for hacks, and I searched and searched for any record of anyone else having the same problem, and found nothing.
Then I finally noticed it was all happening in just one of the forums within that forum - which I’d accidentally set that one to allow anonymous posting. Head, meet Desk. 
Posted in Development & Design
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August 23rd, 2006 at 5:39 pm
I’ve had this problem on GoogleCommunity.com. Yes — you need to make sure the permissions are set to Registered for ALL forums (each needs to be set individually). It should really be the default, considering how you are guaranteed to be flooded with spam if it’s set on Guest (unless you implement some other protection scheme).
Every now and then, the need comes up for a new forum. Just to see what happens, I create the forum and then leave it on the default permissions setting: Guests can post. Within hours, the forum is flooded with spam. It’s funny and sad at the same time.
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:40 pm
That would be a better choice of default settings nowadays. A few years ago, you didn’t have spam on this level to worry about.