PING: radii, and others managing phpBB forums

[cartman]

Howdy all,

I've noticed a strange trend recently. I've had several people try to create new accounts recently with fake email addresses. I know they are fake, because I'm getting the SMTP bounce messages. They seem to almost all be gmail.com addresses.

I'm wondering if any other phpBB folks are experiencing this. I did a quick search of their forum, and didn't see any mention. I'm also wondering if this is trying to open a new exploit or something along those lines.

[chinaski]

There are spam spiders that sign up on phpBB boards to harvest the email address of forum members.

[cartman]

There are spam spiders that sign up on phpBB boards to harvest the email address of forum members.

I guess I just got on their radar, because these are they just started appearing last week. Good thing I have the manual approval process in place.

[Cuckoo]

Enable visual confirmation on your forum. That'll help a little bit. I still get spam registrations from time to time where they put a website link in their sig. I have to delete them each time I get them, but it's not too bad, especially since I don't have the NAFL forum indexed by the search engines anymore.

[cartman]

Enable visual confirmation on your forum.

Is that possible with phpBB? I didn't think it was. If so, I'll definitely enable it. And I saw the same thing with the URL when I took a closer look at one of the accounts.

[Cuckoo]

Is that possible with phpBB? I didn't think it was. If so, I'll definitely enable it.

Yep, it was added in 2.0.17 or thereabouts. If you don't have it and are up to date (I think it's on 2.0.20 now), check out phpbb.com. I remember I had to manually change something to get it as I had been updating from version to version.

According to some, it's not the greatest in the world (some of the script kiddies have already cracked the pics, I think), but it'll help quite a bit.

[cartman]

Yep, it was added in 2.0.17 or thereabouts. If you don't have it and are up to date (I think it's on 2.0.20 now), check out phpbb.com. I remember I had to manually change something to get it as I had been updating from version to version.

According to some, it's not the greatest in the world (some of the script kiddies have already cracked the pics, I think), but it'll help quite a bit.

Yep, I'm on .20. I'll head on over there and see what I need to do to enable it, since I don't see it anywhere in my admin options. Thanks!

[sovereignstar]

Over at the ImperialFL boards we just disable all usernames by using a wildcard in the disallowed names. You want to register on our boards, send an e-mail to the commish.

[Radii]

I have "enable account activation" set to User, so the user has to respond to an e-mail first. Does that not prevent spam spiders that chinaski mentioned? We've gotten a few bogus accounts but nothing that had alarmed me.

I see a visual confirmation option mentioned in the phpbb userguide, but I don't have it on my admin panel. I upgraded the board to the most recent version a month or two ago, is the admin panel a separate upgrade?

[Radii]

Yep, it was added in 2.0.17 or thereabouts. If you don't have it and are up to date (I think it's on 2.0.20 now), check out phpbb.com. I remember I had to manually change something to get it as I had been updating from version to version.

According to some, it's not the greatest in the world (some of the script kiddies have already cracked the pics, I think), but it'll help quite a bit.

you answered my question before I finished asking it. I'll check that out tonight, thanks.

[Cuckoo]

I see a visual confirmation option mentioned in the phpbb userguide, but I don't have it on my admin panel. I upgraded the board to the most recent version a month or two ago, is the admin panel a separate upgrade?

Yeah, the code is there, but you just have to add something to make it show up on the configuration of the admin panel, if I remember correctly. If cartman can't find it, I'll go do a search over there because I had to do it a few versions ago too.

[Cuckoo]

Just from a quick search, this might be what you guys need to check out:

http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article.php?article_id=329