In the past, a surprising amount of my work involves helping clients remove spam and preventing future spam. Spam can appear as spam posts, spam private messages or spam registrations. You may also get spam through using phpBB’s contact page feature. In the case of spam registrations, the spam is usually limited to bogus website URLs for the new “member” that point to spam sites.
Spam issues are less of a problem in recent years because phpBB’s software has improved to use generally effective spambot countermeasures.
Removing spam posts and private message
If you have too much spam to remove manually, there may be a free option. I wrote a spam remover extension. It uses Akismet’s web service (typically used to moderate comments on WordPress blogs) to flag probably spam. You can learn more about the extension, now approved, here. You may prefer that I install and run the extension for you, and I can do this as a service. Use of Akismet’s web service may require a fee paid to Akismet.
Removing spam registrations
Large numbers of spam registrations are fairly easily removed directly in the database. The good news here is that there can be removed for a troubleshooting fee, generally an hour of time. Often you can remove many of these yourself, because they often show up as inactive users, and inactive users are fairly easily removed in the ACP. You can also use the Purge users feature in the ACP to find users that registered within a date range where you noticed a lot of spam.
Preventing spam
Generally you want to upgrade phpBB as newer versions of phpBB have effective spambot countermeasures. If you need to stay on phpBB 3.0 though I can recommend and install some modifications that will reduce or eliminate these. With phpBB 3.2 and 3.3, the version 2 of reCaptcha is supported: checkbox for 3.2 and invisible for 3.3. phpBB 3.3 also supports the invisible reCaptcha V3 service. This generally works pretty well. My clients often prefer to use additional countermeasures, usually the Cleantalk service. So I can install that extension if you are interested, but it costs $8/year to subscribe to the service.
Most boards to not allow guest to posts. If you do you need an effective spambot countermeasure such as the latest version of reCaptcha. I can help you set this up.
If the contact form is enabled, it can generate spam emails to the administrator. You can turn this off yourself or use an extension that creates a contact form that uses a Captcha.
Getting started
To get started I suggest sending me a service inquiry.
Updated January 15, 2022
