Keeping out Spammers

[MorningFlight]

Hi Friedrich,

This weekend, I had to temporarily shut down my own Forum to prevent a meltdown. At one point, I counted 44 spammers trying to sign on at the same time. The software I'm using is phpBB.

I see you're using vBulletin, yet your forum is daily invaded by spammers. At least with phpBB, I have a mod that requires me to activate each user. Nobody gets to post or even show up on the memberlist until activated. What's more, I can delete inactive accounts in bulk. Unfortunately, that means some valid applicants get occasionally deleted as well.

On their website, vBulletin claims to have effective spam prevention, up to and including AKISMET. Before I change from the free phpBB software to the $160 vBulletin app, is there any reason why you're not using anti-spam measures? It must get tiring to see the V-I-A-G-R-A and pedophile crowd hawk their wares on the Lindersoft forum, not to mention the daily work involved in getting rid of them.

Hal Heindel
http://talkprinting.com/phpBB/index.php

[linder]

Hal,

Unfortunately, most popular forums are massively affected by this stupid spamming. But you only see a very small number of spam here on our forums. Behind the scenes, we have several people monitoring the community 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Most spam (85%) is removed immediately (a few seconds after it has been posted). A time-consuming and money-consuming process. But works far better than the automated systems.

BTW, vBulletin is (IMO) the best available forum software and worth every cent.

Friedrich

[linder]

By the way, the upcoming vBulletin 3.7 will provide new Inline Spam Management and Prevention Tools.

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Thank you, Friedrich.

You're right, the hugely popular vBulletin is likely the best and most feature-rich forum package out there. I'm contend with phpBB but would switch today if it weren't for the fact that, because of the way I've modified phpBB, I can prevent spammers from ever showing up on my forum, rather than having to clear them out after they've posted.

Maybe it's the time zone difference that exposes American members to the trash deposited on the Lindersoft Forum. If the new vBulletin 3.7 offers the same degree of spam prevention I now get with phpBB, I'll be happy to shell out the $160.

Hal Heindel
http://talkprinting.com/phpBB/index.php

[linder]

Hal,

If you are interested, I will keep you posted. They have released a new vBulletin 3.7 release candidate yesterday and it looks really cool. We'll switch to 3.7 when it goes gold.

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Friedrich,

Very much so, thank you. I visit your forum a couple of times a week. The absence of spammers will tell me when it's time to switch.

Hal Heindel
http://www.printshopmakeover.com

[linder]

Hal,

<G> I hope it's soon

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Friedrich,

Just a quick update. Wish I could tell you that your spammers are gone, but ...

I did buy and download vBulletin, put up a new web site, installed vB, and had it running in less than an afternoon. Their documention is superb, which I suppose is mainly where the money goes.

In the meantime, I managed to get the speed issue resolved with my existing phpBB 2.0.6 forum. For the time being, at least. That's a good thing, because as easy as it is to start a new forum, getting your existing mySql database transferred and converted is more cumbersome than I have time for. Trying to do it with a restore (an sql text dump) is a no-go. You need to download the entire mySql database. Good luck getting the ISP's approval and help with that. Even if you do everything right (and there's a lot to do right), the forum software providers warn you there's no assurance of success. Terrific!

So here is where I stand: I now have a vBulletin 3.6.9 forum that I won't be using for a while. In fact, I'll probably uninstall it when 3.7.0 goes Gold and then install that. While I was at it, I also installed a free phpBB 3 forum with BlueHost, the same ISP who is hosting my vB forum, just to get a side-by-side comparison. No regrets buying vB, mind you. In light of the time and effort required to convert and transfer forums, $160 is chump change. This time, I'll be extremely selective who I go to bed with.

Meanwhile, I'll keep running my phpBB 2.0.6 forum. That ISP has acknowledged they've had problems and promises to increase mySql capacity. We'll see.

My biggest beef is that none of the forum software providers, at least to my knowledge, offer any means of converting the highly valuable and irreplaceable contents of a commercial forum into some sort of hard copy, be it a .CHM Help file or an Acrobat .pdf. I've had to spend nearly two days manually copying and pasting my forum into a Help & Manual project. It will probably take me another week or more to format that project, but at least the contents of the Morning Flight Forum will finally no longer be at the mercy of an ISP.

There are days when we don't know whether we're coming or going. Other days, it just doesn't matter. To quote from W.C. Field's tombstone: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia!" This has been one of those weeks.

Hal Heindel
http://www.printshopmakeover.com

[linder]

Hi Hal,

To be honest, I really like your idea of converting forum messages to PDF or CHM. Hmm, I like it very much!!! And from the technical point of few, it should not be too hard to implement this.

By the way, you'll get a free update from vBulletin 3.6.9 to 3.7 so the money is not "lost"

We have re-enabled some spam blocking and spam messages decreased by 70%.

Friedrich

[MorningFlight]

Hi Friedrich,

You're right, archiving forum contents into book form wouldn't be difficult. After all, it only amounts to converting threads into chapters and then extracting the individual posts from a MySql database. Hardly rocket science. Maybe Alex at H&M in Austria . . . ?

I don't consider the money spent on vBulletin wasted by any means. Getting the free upgrade to 3.7 just sweetens the pie. Haven't needed their support yet, but from what I can gather at the vB Forum, it's excellent (not as outstanding as yours , of course, but well worth the $160).

Speaking of support, do you ever sleep?

Hal Heindel
http://www.printshopmakeover.com