Spam Trap - Manage Spam and Robots in phpBB Forums.

We have had a forum attached to the site for quite a while now. You can check it out here. It's a phpBB forum and we had it set up so that the administrators had to approve all members before they could post. We also set it up so that users had to enter the information from the captcha (the thing where you have to enter the letters to prove you are not a robot.)

But we started getting a ton of spam users signing up every day. They had obviously figured out the captcha and they were killing us. We were deleting ten to twenty Ferriosals, Viagra999s and Daeruidpas per day.

We were not comfortable adding modifications or anything else to our version of phpBB. We wanted to come up with a solution using the tools we had and we came up with the Spam Trap; it is based on changing the forum permissions to keep the spammers out of our general forums. Here is our solution:

The Spam Trap is brilliantly simple. It prohibits spammers from cluttering up a phpbb message board while freeing up moderators and administrators from the tedious task of deleting spam posts and banning spammers.

1. Enable User Verify Registration.
2. Set up each forum to Private that they require authorization to post. If you have a lot of forums this can take a little bit of setup, but it is well worth it.
3. The Spam Trap forum is set to Registered Users.

So now, anyone can register and the only place they can post is the Spam Trap. The best way to get the humans out is to make a thread letting them know to PM a moderator or just post in the "Let me out" thread. However you decide to arrange to rescue the humans works. Once you find a human who wants to post in your real forums, go into their permissions and allow them into your real forums. Even if you have a ton of forums, it doesn't take more than a minute or so. And when you are done, your humans can post in the places they are supposed to be posting in and the robots are still stuck in the trap.

When you get tired of giggling at the robot posts in the spam trap, just go in and delete them all in one shot. If you get a kick from deleting the spammers, go for it.

If you are running a forum and are getting frustrated by spammers, give the Spam Trap a try. We have found that it takes a lot of pressure off of our moderators and administrators and we don't have to worry about our regular forums getting overrun by junk.

If you have any questions about how to set it up, please feel free to contact us. We aren't very techie here but we did clean up our forum!

Note** We don't know anything about 'versions' and all that stuff. So we assume that this works with all phpBB installs. Also - if you already have a forum with a lot of members and forums, you will have to set up the forum AND user permissions in the beginning so your folks can see your forums again. This actually works great because you can find out who is an active poster by making each one post in the "Let me out" thread. People who don't post can stay in there. Who cares?