Filtering User Registration/Activation To avoid forum spam

Regular Joined: Sep 14, 2003 Posts: 74

We've recently been experiencing alot of spammers who register as normal users on the site and start posting on our forums, many times using pornographic material.

As you can understand, we are constantly behind them, trying to clean up the mess and delete user accounts.

My question is how can we selectively allow user accounts to be activated so that no user can simply register, activate their account and start posting rubbish on our site!

We are using Phpnuke 6.9 with quite a few addons Smile

Looking forward to a response or suggestion.

Many thanks.

Chris P.

Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2009 3:40 pm

Sounds like you are looking for the Approve Membership Module: http://www.ulsoft.scarbridge.co.uk/

We have a similar mod in RavenNuke, just in case you ever think of upgrading. Wink

Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2009 3:59 pm

Jake,

Thanks for the quick reply. We've considered upgrading and I've also spoken to Raven about it numerous times. Because we've added quite a few addons, we've decided to keep it as is at the moment and perhaps upgrade sometime in the near future.

Many thanks once again!

P.S Just to be on the safe side, I've identified Approve_Membership6.1.6-7.6.tar.gz being the most closest to 6.9, will this work or should I be looking at a different file to download ?

Cheers,

Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2009 11:28 pm

Probably best to ask Arnold over at Ulsoft.

Posted: Sun Jul 19, 2009 11:45 pm

Will do, thanks again for your response!

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2009 5:54 am

I had PHP Nuke 6.5 running several years and never had to use any kind of Approve Membership Module. In my opinion there are many different ways within the phpBB forum , Nuke Sentinel, and .htaccess to make your site for spammer more or less uninteresting. Also there are phpBB anti spam mods available.
Of course they will still register because the security code in older Nuke versions doesn´t really protect your site but it will be hard to add spam entries. Make sure your forums version is a newer one. Mine was 2.17 at that time in Nuke 6.5 if I remember correct.

Btw: I upgraded from 6.5 to RavenNuke and it isn´t so difficult but could be very time expensive if you have many manual changes.

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2009 6:21 am

Susann,

We are in the process of looking again to upgrade to the latest RavenNuke. The biggest problem is 'time' as there is not much available these days!

In any case, I think upgrading will introduce a number of features that will help deal with spam.

Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2009 6:48 am

Wish you good luck !