Customizing SMF > Building Your Community and other Forum Advice

How to reduce spam on an SMF using CloudFlare, Bad Behaviour Mod and other means

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ryukent:
This guide was taken from my blogpost at ryukent.com

There are a few simple ways of protecting your Simple Machines Forum (SMF) forum against spam. Spammers seem to target forums and they build their spam machines for well known forum platforms like SMF. These simple steps will help you almost eradicate spam from your forum. This post is based on the current build of Simple Machines Forum at the time of writing (2.0.2).

1. Registration

Make it hard for spambots to register on your SMF forum. The three main ways of doing this are captcha codes, questions and email activation. Captcha is easy to fool and the strong setting seems a little too hard for even real humans to read, so I’d set to medium. Forcing the user to answer a simple question can really reduce spam. Make it easy like “What is the second word in this sentence?” Also, having more than one question option can be useful, but only ask one question. Finally email activation will reduce spammers that are using fake emails.

2. Bad Behavior Mod

This is mod that allows monitoring of spam like behaviour and automatically initiates bans.

When setting up the mod, you need to be careful to have the correct settings to make it run correctly. First visit projecthoneypot.org and sign up for a free BL API key. You will also need a Project Honeypot QuickLink. Enter the details into the Bad Behaviour settings page. If you are using a reverse proxy, make sure it is set up correctly or else everyone will have the proxy IP and that IP will quickly get banned, banning everyone in the process. I recommend using CloudFlare. It is free. See below.

3. CloudFlare

CloudFlare could be described as the ultimate solution. It is also the most complicated but well worth it if you have the time and ability to change the DNS settings on you domain (their setup guides are very helpful for people who don’t know much about DNS too). Basically CloudFlare is a secure content delivery network with antihacking facilities. It routes your traffic through their hardened servers and automatically filters out known malware. You might think this will slow your site down, but in actual fact, their advanced compression and simplification algorithms actually speed the site up most of the time! In the last 30 days, CloudFlare blocked 2,684 threats from this Blog alone.

It’s free to sign up and you need to follow the instructions on redirecting your domain through CloudFlare. Once it’s installed (and it can take 24 hours or so for the DNS settings to filter through), you need to install the CloudFlare mod into your SMF forum and also configure Bad Behaviour mod to play nice with CloudFlare.

Download the CloudFlare SMF Mod from my blog post (I'm not allowed to post external links here)

In Bad Behaviour settings, tick the ‘Enable Reverse Proxy’ box and in ‘IP call to Reverse Proxy’ put “Cf-Connecting-Ip”.
 

You should now notice a significant reduction in spam on your SMF forum.

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