Spam control (Big Boards)

Title: Spam control
Description: through permissions and moderation

HelenaZF - October 26, 2006 07:43 PM (GMT)

There are some things you can do to prevent spammers from littering your forums.

Basic suggestions:

Enable e-mail validation. This assures that new members have a valid e-mail address. This will eliminate a lot of bot posting.
Disable guest posting, or put guest posts on moderation
Create a new member group that has no PM, email, memberlist view permissions, and put that group on moderation.

How to put new members on moderated posting:

Edit the permissions for your New Member group. Include the restrictions mentioned above.
ACP > Users & Groups > Manage User Groups > Edit New Member Group Settings > Global Permissions

Edit your New Member group:
ACP > Users & Groups > Manage User Groups > Edit New Member Group > Posting permissions:
"Can avoid moderation queues?" NO

Set up moderation:
ACP > Forum Control > Manage Forums > Settings (for forums used by new members) > Postable Forum Settings:
"Moderate postings?" Choose options from drop-down box. I would suggest just moderating new topics. Bots and spammers don't generally try to reply to topics, and you won't get a bunch of extra moderation work that way.

[Note: there will be a notification message at the top of the moderated forum when there are new posts to be moderated. Click on your ModCP link and then use the link there to find the posts awaiting moderation.]

I do keep a guest book forum open that allows guest posting. I have used the methods described above (except applied to the guest group) plus one other. I didn't want to have to see porn pictures on the posts I was moderating, so I use this code written by AndrewK. It prevents the use of the [IMG] tags for the Guest group. (Guests can still play with the smilies!)

Footers:

CODE

<script>
if(document.REPLIER && document.getElementById('userlinks').getElementsByTagName('a')[0].innerHTML.match(/Log in/i)) {
var a = document.REPLIER.Post
function removeImgs() {
if(a.value.match(/\[img\]/i)) {
a.value = a.value.replace(/\[img\].*?\[\/img\]/ig, '')
}
}
document.REPLIER.onsubmit = removeImgs;
}
</script>

If your problem is spambots who register, validate and then post their garbage, you will want to read Gladstone's method of preventing spambot posting:
http://bigboardsresources.com/index.php?showtopic=893

It is almost 100% effective.

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