Spam

[Ramsfan]

Im sorry anna. I come here for origami not mortagage or stuff like that

[Ramsfan]

Another one. this one about iraq go post that on CNN

[Daydreamer]

Ramsfan, if you are here for Origami maybe you should stop whining about things you can't change and actually fold something.

Unfortunately, spam is something you can't really prevent on the internet anymore. It's something you have to learn to ignore or, if you can't ignore it, you might want to stop using the internet altogether. You don't reply to each spam mail you get in your email inbox, do you? (I hope not!!)

And as I said before, you don't have to make a posting for each spam message you see, because spam will be deleted anyway and your message will be left without context. Such messages can be considered as spam as well if you take the meaning of Stupid Pointless Annoying Message.

Because the forum software is a third party software neither the forum administrator nor the moderators can do anything against spam except deleting it. If you have ideas about improving spam protection this is actually the wrong place to bring them, you should consider going to http://www.phpbb.com/ and give your input in their forum.

But there's one flaw with every possible spam protection you can find. It won't hold for long because as soon as someone implements a new kind of protection someone will come up with a way to circumvent this system with some tool in a matter of days or even hours.
That's why adding image-verification for each post doesn't help much. There are already automatic tools that can pass that kind of verification for the registration on the forum, so they can definitely also pass a per-post verification easily.

PS. Ramsfan, as a sidenote, you don't need to make multiple posts right after each other. There is an "EDIT" button in the top right corner of each of your posts where you can add or correct things in your postings after submitting them.

[islandmassive]

too true

[snkhan]

As many of the mods have iterated in previous posts, it's really difficult to block SPAM registrations. The board is a vanilla install of phpBB (to make upgrades as painless as possible), but I have activated visual confirmation, which has reduced the volume of spam registrations.

As Gerwin has mentioned previously, even using a CAPTCHA mechanism is unlikely to deter a spammer. Programs exist which can easily decipher the CAPTCHA image (see sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/ for examples of what can be accomplished).