T1B

I don't know if the guys who run this board ever check this section out or not, but I have a question about phpbb boards.

If the mod's and other readers don't know who I am, I am a regular posted in the College Football area.

My question is this, on a PHPBB based board I run for a non-profit group I am constantly being attacked by bots and such, it doesn't seem like there is much of that on this board. I have the most recent version of PHPBB, is there a MOD or something that prevents these annoying bots from posting their porn all over my site?

Yes. Set up your board so that everyone has to register to post, and also you can set it up that all new members must be activated by an admin, using a verifiable email addy they have to provide and use in order to finalize the activation from their side. in other words, they register, you receive an email indicating their username and such, and you activate them, sending an email message to their addy that they then have to reply to in order to get in and post.

With an unregistered board, you are asking for trouble, since anyone can post with no restrictions. Bots have a hard time getting by a registration forum.

An additional hack you can use is one where they have to input the numbers and letters of a computer generated random image that only appears once for each individual registering. it appears on their sign up screen. They don't use that hack here, but yahoo uses it, and several of the tech boards also use it and it is available as a hack you can install for your forum.

Here is the link to the bot blocking script:

http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/560

You should also be able to see ips, and thus ban the offending ones that way too.

BlindRef, you know the dudes who run this board. :|

Anyway, read up on robots.txt, a file that can force bots away from your server.

Here's a site with info:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Sorry PSU, I didn't know what role you played with the admin.

With all the changes, I get confused easily.

Thanks for the info, I'll look into both of those.