Spam is picking up

Spam is picking up

December 4th, 2006

One bad thing about PHPBB, I’m discovering, is that it is very susceptible to spam. It seems like I prune about a dozen posts a day from the forum. Either they are blatantly so (links to viagra, PC software and Britany Spears nude), or they are honeypots for future spam (authentic posts scraped from other forums elsewhere on the web, hoping to be changed to blatant spam later). The RSS feed that shows the most recent changes on the front page has been a great help, as I can very easily check new posts for content before deleting the crap. I had to impose an inconvenient time limit on post frequency to discourage the massive submissions, and that has helped keep the problem from being worse.

There are two problems here. First, in a way the low use of this site by actual community members helps keep the deletions manageable. Frequent daily checking of the site coupled with infrequent contributions of value means I don’t have to go off the bookmarked home page to check for new stuff. If future changes pump up the site volume, the current method of spam patrol will get a little more inconvenient. Second, the site seems to be on some spammer list now as a free place to post crap. The variety and frequency has picked up, even if the effectiveness has not (the posts aren’t lasting long). Spammers automate and thus don’t worry much about checking for anything more than success of a post.

Among the to-do list items is a reworking of the submission process in PHPBB to give denials to more crap posts. The best solutions, though, would be a tool for PHPBB that works like Akismet does for WordPress blogs. That is, similar posts show up all over the web. Having all posts go through a central database check can flag them as spam if someone has encountered and rejected a post as spam previously, and then quarantine them. Collective action works miracles for the blog, but wikis and forums need the same kind of protection.

Entry Filed under: Techie Alerts, Meta, To-Do List