I've cleaned up the forum of all the porn spam, which now is including images. Nothing like trying to delete this at work and suddenly have hardcore porn images on the screen. *_* I've complained to Neelick to try to get the spam-hole plugged.

On the topics list page, if you go all the way down to the Southeast corner of the page, there should be a link that lets you moderate the forum. When you go in there, you can move/delete spam topics without having to actually open them and expose yourself to the filth within. *Hugs ANB*

There are some creative things that you can do to befuddle SEO (search engine optimizer) software that creates the spambot posts. Like the name suggests, SEO softwares harvest links from search engines like google and uses those links to find places like this. Some things I've done to increase defense against spambots are:

1. Use the robots.txt file to disable web crawlers.
2. Change the url of the forum, or forum sections that seem to attract the most attacks.
3. Rename the forum sections so that they do not include common search keywords like "general". The Kaleidoscope Room is a good example of a hard to search forum name.
4. Create a phoney forum section with common keywords in the name to trap spambots so they don't post in active areas of the board.

Neelick should probably look into upgrading to a newer version of phpBB as well because spam security has probably been improved a lot since this version came out. I'll also move this to Questions for Neelick since it is a board related issue rather than a Tenchi Muyo discussion and Neelick is more likely to see this there.

Funny you should mention this.....

Ok it hasn't been field tested yet, but I just finished adding some anti spambot code which I wrote myself. I've been using PHP a LOT lately and applied some of my newly acquired skills to preventing spambots from being able to log in.

Anyway I'm goign to clean up the database right now. Hopefully my new code will be able to prevent most spambots from being able to register. There have been some which have successfully posted without registering. I'm not sure what to about spambots that are posting when they haven't been registered. That shoudn't work at all.

Anyway let's see if my new code helps. I'm goign to make an announcment on the newsbar.