The existing forum uses Drupal Forum. It is having terrible spam problems.
Do you think SMF instead would stop the spam dead? How does it achieve this?
Inside the SMF admin panel there are anti-spam settings you can configure to help stop spam.
There are also a number of mods you can use with SMF to help stop spam.
Straight out of the box, with no settings changed, SMF is as vulnerable as any other forum. CAPTCHA can be set (but isn't all that effective any more). You should set several questions to be asked, and have new member approval by administrator (or at least, need to respond to an email). There are a number of mods that can be installed to check the applicant against known spammer lists. You should set a minimum number of posts to do thinks like allow links and set a signature, and a maximum number have to solve a CAPTCHA in order to post. Among all those, it should greatly cut down on spam, but nothing can totally eliminate it. When someone spams, be ruthless about banning them and erasing all their posts.
I did not get a box with my copy of SMF.
Must have been a pirated copy. Send me $34.99 plus tax and I'll send you a legit softcopy.
And you could then be done for infringing a trademark. Isn't that fun!
:)
All forums experience spam problems to some extent. Moderation is the only real answer. You can put in anti-spam measures and they help to a degree, but ultimately you still need to either moderate who joins, or the posts. If you have a large forum then you need to have others helping you to moderate. Given that, I love how SMF operates and it's fairly easy to set up. There are always people here who are willing to point you in the right direction and I was able to set up a new forum quite quickly and easily a couple of months ago.
You will never stop a determined human from posting their junk to a forum. That is where the final defence of moderation comes in. But ideally you need to block as much automated stuff as possible, without deterring genuine site visitors.
Most current forum software has default options which will deter the bots. Don't rely on catchpa systems. They are often cracked. Indeed on my SMF I've now turned them off. SMF's Question and Answer verification works well, the only problem being if you have multiple language visitors there aren't multi language questions and answer options. I'd suggest though you need a number of these Q & A, requiring at least 2 questions to be asked on a random selection.
But it's the add ons and modifications that can really do the stuff to block the spammers before they even get to your forum. Amongst the most powerful of these is Bad Behaviour. This is a third party security system. The mod has been ported to work with SMF, available from the customize lists above. I believe there will be versions of this for many other forum types too.
Quote from: movedgoalposts on July 09, 2012, 11:34:12 AMAmongst the most powerful of these is Bad Behaviour. This is a third party security system. The mod has been ported to work with SMF, available from the customize lists above.
Thanks for this,movedgoalposts. I wonder how Bad Behaviour compares with Mollom, another software as a service anti-spam solution. (The client is open source, and you can use the service for free up to a limited number of submissions a month.)