Errors

[akreider2]

The main goal of spammers it to post links to improve website rankings in search engines. This happens even if nobody clicks on the links.  Google, Yahoo, and other search engines have bots that visit almost every page on your website.  When these search engines see a link to another website they count it as a "vote" in favor of that website and boost its ranking (unless they find the link on a website that is totally spam - in which case the link might be counted against you, but as this is a quality website any link from it is golden!).

You could also tell all the bots not to visit the memberslist page (with a robots.txt file).  However that will be less obvious for the spammers.

[akreider2]

I think the downtime is regularly causing email notifications when someone responds to your thread to not get sent.

[akreider2]

You could run a query to set the website to '' for everyone that has zero posts.  That'd be a good way of getting rid of all the existing spam links.

[Imperious Leader]

It takes like 15 minutes just to kill 10 of them. This site has thousands of zero post counts and i don't have that kind of time.

I can only clear the daily idiot spammers off the site.

[djensen]

Email authentication is on, it doesn't help. Not allowing links in member profiles is also no an option in SMF.

I tried installing an Akismet (anti-spam) plugin for SMF but then posting would time out. Why? I don't know. Nearly all Wordpress sites on the internet use Akismet and I've never seen an issue where it take 5 minutes to post something.

Both phpBB and SMF are pieces of ���� software. Look how you install so called "modules" you have to manually edit code core to the system or you run a patch that does the same thing. It's garbage and unmaintainable. At least with Phorum, modules are modules, like they are in Wordpress.

I've made the first step toward moving to Phorum, it is installed. Next step is look an feel. After that I need a user and post migration script. After that I could launch but the dice roller won't be ready.

That is weird. I'm familiar with phpbb2.   I didn't bother banning people, I just didn't let them link to their website until they had posted.  Do you have email authentication on?  That helps.

Unfortunately the evil spammers employ real people. So even a good captcha will only get you so far.  Do you have one?

Captchas have been getting really hard to decipher recently, even if you are a real person.

On my blog I don't approve users unless they manually email me.  Depending on how much traffic you get, that might be less work.

[Imperious Leader]

Both phpBB and SMF are pieces of sh*t software

100% True.