Speed up your board posting time.

[~HG~]

The whole idea of a forum is to keep people interested and if things move pretty quick they will all be interested and the number of posts and topics will generate at a very very acceptable rate.

After all, when we set up a forum, we do so to allow people to interact with each other and if there are long delays with that interaction they will become bored and go elsewhere ............ pretty darn quick.

So a little tip to speed things up for your user's is first of all set your flood limit time to less than 5 secs. The longer it is, the sooner they will leave.

The second is (and this hack is installed on this board) is to install the Instant Post Redirect by eviL<3

You should be able to find this hack at http://phpbbmodders.net

I also have it installed at another forum I run and the members just love it ... no more waiting for the page to appear that the post was successful. It just returns you to the topic and you can see your post removing a delay of around maybe 10 secs or more.

[bubudi]

'scuse me for asking, but what does the flood limit time do?

[~HG~]

The flood limit time set's the time between post's that a user can post in forums.

The longer the delay (in seconds) the longer a user has to wait before they can post again.

[bubudi]

thanks, it seems to me that the flood limit time might be there as a basic anti-spam measure. think about a spam bot set to bombard your board with 10 or even hundreds of drug adverts in one go. this won't work with a good flood limit time. a clever spammer might realise there is a flood limit and rewrite the bot program with a delay, but i think most either wouldn't work out the flood limit or won't have the programming skills to circumvent it. what flood limit time do you recommend?

i also saw that there was a topic here dedicated to getting a review of your phpbb board, but the rules that apply to review requests insist that boards must have the 'powered by phpbb' message. isn't that asking to be hacked or spammed? i have read that hackers and spammers regularly plug that very message into search engines to find phpbb boards to mess with. i agree with keeping some kind of acknowledgement of the phpbb team on the footer of your template, but perhaps this could be done with a picture or simply just having 'phpbb' instead of the whole distinct message. sorry to be critical, but i reckon if you make demands or recommendations to your members, they shouldn't be potentially dangerous.

[~HG~]

Firstly, the Powered by phpBB message is part of the phpBB copyright and should remain intact hence the requirement for that to form part of the phpBB review.

As for spam bots posting due to flood limits, you are correct in what you say in certain respects so the object is to prevent spam bots from registering in the first place which is relevantly easy to do with a couple of hacks or even by using Custom Profile fields specific to your board. I use 5 secs as my flood time limit.

See topic: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=74

[bubudi]

thanks, i will play around with the flood limit a little.

Firstly, the Powered by phpBB message is part of the phpBB copyright and should remain intact hence the requirement for that to form part of the phpBB review.

phpbb is public license so it is not a legal requirement to keep this message. morally, i think one should keep the phpbb name or logo if using their software. it should be enough to put a linked logo image in the footer or just have a link that says 'phpbb'. having 'powered by phpbb' is a potential security risk.

As for spam bots posting due to flood limits, you are correct in what you say in certain respects so the object is to prevent spam bots from registering in the first place which is relevantly easy to do with a couple of hacks or even by using Custom Profile fields specific to your board.

i have been using custom profile fields for a while now, but still get spam registrations with fields such as website, interests, occupation, etc all filled in - sometimes even an avatar uploaded. a bit elaborate for a human spam registration, i think. more like a bot that has been updated to bypass custom profile fields. i am seriously considering the photo visual confirmation mod which replaces the now useless default phpbb3 captcha. do you recommend any other mods? i try to avoid mods as much as possible as they can sometimes conflict with each other (especially seo mod) and other issues, not to mention that mods make it harder to get support.

[bubudi]

this is one of many programs available to spam phpbb boards and even has a delay setting to account for the flood limit.
http://www.phpbbsubmitter.com/

[~HG~]

The only anti-spam tool I use on my phpbb3 forums is Prime Anti Bot which I have found to be extremely successful to date.

One thing about bot's is that no matter what precautions you take to stop them registering and then spamming, is that they will eventually find a way around it.

There is also this hack which I have not used but to me appears to be a comprehensive way of stopping them is Anti Spam ACP

[bubudi]

the prime anti bot looks very much the same as using custom profile fields only a little bit more versatile. i'm thinking about the photo visual confirmation mod. unlike other captchas this uses a series of pictures and then asks you a question about it. it takes a little bit of human reasoning to answer.

still, a human can register several accounts and then use a submitter such as the one i linked to above to spam your board. i'm thinking 2 things would be useful to truly stop spam:
1. disallow url on profile or linking in a post for a user's first 5 posts (or whatever minimum you want).
2. turn on a few spam filters in the acp - some of the pharmaceuticals would be a good start.

if you know how to do a quick mod that achieves no. 1, please let me know.

[~HG~]

There are already a number of hacks around that can do what you are looking for.

This one for example: http://www.phpbbhacks.com/download/8730 and then there is this one. http://www.lithiumstudios.org/forum/vie ... f=31&t=941

You could also check out: http://www.phpbbhacks.com/category3/10/