Re: Russian spam?
Posted: December 4th, 2023, 4:35 pm
Is it possible to moderate users' posts until they've made a legit post (and not a generic "That's really interesting" one), as I presume they're bots rather than posting manually?
Yeah, that was the idea, and something that PHPBB seems to support, however the issue I ran into was that apart from placing the new users in their own group, the also got the normal "registered users" role - which then allowed access to the rest of the board. So then I made a new group called "approved users" and move all existing users to it and limited the old "registered users" but that did not work plus it seems it limited all users on the forum, by for example loosing access to private messages.
So now all the roles and permissions are set back to how it used to me and I have to wade through a lot of spam users as I did for years now each and every day behind the scenes. I'll look into alternative ways around this. I have some ideas but will check on the PHPBB support forum what seems to make the most sense.
For those wondering why these spammers exist - simple - they just want to get whatever spam they have out there on the internet. Then the search bots will pick it up and they will make it into search results or ads. So this forum is just an means to an end for spammers, which is why there is a such a high volume applying to join.
This is one of very few public forums that are completely free of ads and free to join. A very lucrative platform for spammers.
