*easy* way to stop bullentin board spam (free!)

[Johnathan]

Ok,

I've seen a few posts of people asking how to stop forum spam, it's really quite simple, so thought I'd post a solution.

If you are using any of the 'popular' forum solutions (i.e., phpBB, vbBulletin), most spammers will find a way to spam it, because it is mass results for little effort. (I.e., they only need to figure out once how to spam a single phpBB install, then can literally do 1000's in seconds). This includes common 'captcha' techniques. (So you can even get spammed even if you have captcha).

So to circumvent that, since most bb installs are via php, simply do this.

1. Create a 'challenge-response' question. I.e., like "What is 5+5?"

2. Add an extra field where a user signs up (or makes a post), something like "Secret Answer". So your HTML would be something like:
<input type=textbox name=secretanswer></text>

3. Then, (this requires a 'little' bit of programming, so if you don't know how, get a friend to do it for you). Simply go in the php code, find out where the 'post' is made, and then add a line like this:

if($_REQUEST["secretanswer"]!="10") { echo "Wrong Answer! Please try again!"; exit; }

And voila!

No more spam!

Most spammers won't bother to actually visit your site and reprogram their software to answer '10' to your question, so now for the most part you just have real humans!

[Ken Strong]

Originally Posted by Johnathan

1. Create a 'challenge-response' question. I.e., like "What is 5+5?"

What if they don't know the answer?

Thanks for this, looks good!

[Johnathan]

Originally Posted by KenStrong

What if they don't know the answer?

Thanks for this, looks good!

Lol, then are you sure you want *that* kind of user making a post on your site?