Fixed a spam problem in phpBB
Sunday, September 7th, 2008yahoo! destroyed 10 years of movie club data the other day. All of the movie reviews from club members, all of the movies we have seen, etc, gone. So, I decided to create a new version of the club on my server. There was something called phpBB already there, so I used that. Wow, does it really lack some nice features, but at least it is functional.
As soon as I created the club, I noticed a stream of spammers signing up. Very strange, since at the time I didn’t have any links to it, and searching for the spammers IP and email addresses, I found that they are commonly known spammers. Makes me think that phpBB gets a kickback…
I noticed that it was hard to block spammers with phpBB. Since I couldn’t block them by keyword, they could create user accounts, which would show up in the Member List as well as on the front page as New Accounts. So, they were still getting their message out, even though I deleted them as soon as I could.
So, today, I decided to put an end to this! I went into the php/sql code for phpBB and made it so that un-activated accounts do not show up in the Member List, nor in the count of active users, nor on the front page as new users. Until I active someone, it is like they never signed up!
I got the idea from this blog software. I have 2 or 3 spammers a day who create accounts here and post spam. But this blog software doesn’t show the world their spam until I approve it, which I never do. I am not sure why the default on phpBB isn’t to disable unapproved members - it is kind of weird in these days of spammers. Actually, it is weirder than that, they do not even have the option to do it - I had to learn enough php/sql to add this option for myself.
If anyone is interested in the changes, I will gladly give these back to the community - maybe 10+ lines worth of changes across 4-ish files to get it all working correctly for admin vs normal user.
-Edward
PS The movie club site: http://theedward.net/movieclub/ which is open to all who want to post about movies, or go see a movie with us on Tuesdays in the SF Bay Area (we try to go every Tuesday).