New user's registration have been closed due to high spamming and low trafic on this forum. Please contact forum admins directly if you need an account. Thanks !
Yes, we are trying to find a solution to this spam problem (for those of you who wonder, I deleted a spam post first in this thread). Changing to something else than phpbb could be a solution, but we have to be able to export our current database to that forum. Or installing better spam filters or authentication processes.
If anyone has tips, please let us know.
Thanks,
/Johannes (Excito co-founder a long time ago, but now I'm just Johannes)
phpbb is very good but so well-spread that it's an easy target.
Here are three forums I have installed. They are all open-source, with an active community and a migration script from phbbb.
* Vanilla (no tables, lots of add-ons)
* PunBB (fast)
* Simple Machines (not tested for long, but great community)
Perhaps you could try a different CAPTCHA method for authentication. We were getting a lot of spam on a forum I moderate and making changes to this helped a lot, we hardly get any now. I'll try to find out some details.
Vanilla and SimpleMachines come with rss out of the box. The SimpleMachines one is simple: one global rss feed. Vanilla has an rss per forum.
But there are extensions to expand this behaviour with these three forums.
A couple of months ago we made the switch from phpBB to vBulletin on a website I run. And I have to say I couldn't be happier!
The backend of vBulletin is so much better than phpBB, the array of features it provides are very impressive and we haven't had a single issue of spam bots posting stuff since we made the switch. We also didn't have any significant issues migrating the content from phpBB over to vBulletin.
vBulletin isn't free like most of the other solutions mentioned here, but personally I feel that the €139 were a great investment!
You can always test Joomla.
with Joomla you can show your main site and have a more profesional store, and forum, if you dont like Joomla you can test Php-fusion.
We looked in to changing the "CAPTCHA" as spoodie suggested. Unfortunately that required GD that we dont have installed at the moment.
What we have done is some minor adjustments to the registration flow that might keep some bots out. And in the memberlist we now show only activated accounts.
We most likely will shortly delete all inactive users since they mostly belong to the spammer category.
Other than that most other major things will have to wait until we move to another server.
Regarding spam. I must say that when we added kittenauth to our registration we have been very spared from spam Lets hope it takes some time until they crack that.
So at the moment the only thing we actually miss with our forum install is better rss capabilities. The one we run now is somewhat crippled.