[tripletaker]

I have a forum that requires administator approval before activiation of accounts. It's a forum for only a small group of people. Daily, I get many people who try register with a bogus name (usually relating to poker) and daily I have to delete their username. I have a feeling it's the same person every time. How can I get rid of them? Or ban them or get them to stop signing up? I use phpBB.

The e-mail address they use is also bogus. The website they claim are strange: They're sites of random words put together in a paragaph. Here are a few examples:
http://online-poker.eloep.com/
http://ansonyericssondownload.blogspot.com/

[Oisín]

1) It’s not “the same person every time”—in fact, it’s not a person at all, just bots.

2) There’s no real way of stopping them from trying to sign up, I don’t think. You could try (if you’re savvy enough) to add one of those “Please type the numbers you see in the above picture” things to the registration process, but I’m not even sure that’s entirely possible with phpBB.

If you’re not extremely short on server space, just leave the fake sign-ups for a while and do some big cleaning out once a month or so. Less bothersome than having to remove new ones every day. As long as you require administrator approval for account activations, they can’t really do anything other than make their fake sign-ups.

[registered_user]

change the credit in the footer so it says something other than "Powered by phpbb"

that's a first step.

but it's perfect, it's just something you'll have to deal with for a while.

[jay3ld]

if you are able to get an ip address add that ip to the .htaccess file and bann them from your whole site

this is how i banned a few through my .htaccess file

Code:
#Ever heard of IP Banning? this does it. just add deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
<Files 998.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>
deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

then just make a file called 998.shtml or you could rename it in there. changing 998 in the <file> to something else. then you just nicely tell them they have been banned.

i havn't used phpbb in a while but im sure it gives you ip address of those who are signing up.

[rcardona]

Originally Posted by Oisín

2) There’s no real way of stopping them from trying to sign up, I don’t think. You could try (if you’re savvy enough) to add one of those “Please type the numbers you see in the above picture” things to the registration process, but I’m not even sure that’s entirely possible with phpBB.

The last few versions of phpBB have visual confirmation ("captcha"). Unfortunately it can be broken via some websites that break captcha systems.

I run an OS X system on phpBB and we don't show accounts that have not completed registration so I just delete these accounts from time to time.

I'm waiting for a better upgrade to phpBB's visual confirmation so the bots will be stopped from registering in the first place.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by jay3ld

if you are able to get an ip address add that ip to the .htaccess file and bann them from your whole site

this is how i banned a few through my .htaccess file

Code:
#Ever heard of IP Banning? this does it. just add deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
<Files 998.shtml>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Files>
deny from XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

then just make a file called 998.shtml or you could rename it in there. changing 998 in the <file> to something else. then you just nicely tell them they have been banned.

i havn't used phpbb in a while but im sure it gives you ip address of those who are signing up.

Even better, if your host is cPanelX-enabled you can do it directly and quickly from the control panel, no need to muck with the .htaccess-file every time.

[Diggory Laycock]

You can try phpbb anti-spam mods
e.g.

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=210055

[frates]

find a host that runs mod_security for Apache, it'll block spam for anything you have : forum, blogs, whatever......

[jay3ld]

Originally Posted by frates

find a host that runs mod_security for Apache, it'll block spam for anything you have : forum, blogs, whatever......

some forums have problems with mod_security running... im not sure if phpbb does but i know some do. and usally either its new forums or you have to hack/change things around to get it working

ps. i like doing thigns though the .htacces even though i got cpanel. that way you can put # to comment on what is going on unlike cpanel does. it should.