Website Forums?

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Mekanic01

Gawd
Joined
Jul 11, 2002
Messages
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I run a Wordpress website for local racing, and I'd like to re-introduce a forum to the site. I had PhpBB at one time, but the spam accounts were horrible. I don't get tons of traffic, but I would like to have something that might generate a bit more use, especially during the off season.

Now part of the problem is cost. I'm making no money for what I'm doing, so I'd rather not pay for something. And I know, "You get what you pay for".

But I would like some suggestions as to what I can use.

Thanks
 
Open a subreddit on Reddit.

Doesn't provide much in terms of being customizable, but it is easy to set up and maintain. Plus many people already have Reddit accounts. For your use case this is probably the best way to go.
 
Mekanic01 said:
I had PhpBB at one time, but the spam accounts were horrible.
Click to expand...
I think it's all in how you set it up and what options you have for registration. That undoubtedly means manually approving new registrations. We do it on [H]. Sometimes things slip thru the filters, but an email addy like "[email protected]" is a dead giveaway and won't pass human eyes for final approval.

I frequent a pretty large guitar forum that uses PhpBB (classicalguitardelcamp.com) and haven't seen any spam problems there in several years.

You'll want to use a captcha that uses a question only a human could answer, which will help keep the bots out.

There's also stopforumspam.com. We use their plugin here, it supposedly works with other forums and blogs as well. It denies more registrations at the gate than it lets in.
 
I was recently debating myself between Phpbb and SMF to replace a couple of my forums which I'll be converting over. Ended up going SMF due to the better security track record. Also it's a good idea to turn off registrations in the forum and instead redirect to a custom form. Lot of spam bots are designed for specific well known forums in mind, but if you have something non standard you'll at least be safe for a while till the bots are coded to use your form too. You still want to add several captcha layers. SMF has lots of anti spam options such as security questions and captchas even for posting for new members.

Admin approval of accounts and posts is not a bad idea either.

Also auto delete accounts that have 0 posts for more than 24 hours. Chances are if a human is registering they probably want to post something right away. Some spam bots will make accounts and spam later on with them.

Either way there's not 1 single thing you can do, you have to combine a lot together.
 
I wouldn't suggest phpBB. Or most any other prefab. Spam is horrible

I eventually got to the point where i just disabled new registrations all together. a one man show doesn't have time to pick through that much spam with a day job. Now if you got a bunch of people to pick through the junk then it would probably work out better for you.

There are plugins and captcha to help deal with it but even those get bypassed fairly often.

EDIT: stopforumspam.com looks useful.. wish i would've saw that site a couple years ago

I ended up disabling registrations and using discus for the comments leaving the forum posts up for posterity. for my small site i'm happy with it.
 
Stopfforumspam is fricking amazing.

And IMO MyBB is the best free BB software (many others agree). PhpBB3 is so old.
 
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