I have a phpbb forum for a while now and as it’s now indexed in seach engines Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex etc. the forum is already tortured by dozen of spam bots crawling with requests to register.
For a few months already I’ve configured the new registration requests in the forum to demand adminstrator confirmation.
However my administrator configured email address is receiving tons of spam (requests of spam bots for new users registration).
The whole purpose of the spam bots are to register on my phpbb board in order to post spam links and that way increase certain pages pagerank in search engines, pretty nasty …
My phpbb forum is happily installed on a Stable release of Debian Lenny and my exact installed phpbb3 package version is 3.0.2-4
Luckily this version of phpbb board includes already embedded support for Visual Confirmation (e.g. CAPTCHA support).
In order to enable this support these are the exact steps I had to follow:
1. Login to phpbb forum with admin user
2. Go to bottom of the forum and click over Administration Control Panel
3. Navigate to:
GENERAL -> BOARD CONFIGURATION (Visual confirmation settings)
On the screen which will appear in General options make sure the following options are set:
Enable visual confirmation for registrations: Enabled
Enable visual confirmation for guest postings
GD Captcha: Yes
GD Captcha foreground noise: Yes
Now simply press the Submit which is located in the bottom and the CAPTCHA in new user registration on your phpbb forum will appear.
