In the last few months I started getting a bucket load of spam into my phpBB forum.

To solve it I set the option that new users should automatically be added to the “Newly Registered Users” group and set the permissions on that group so that all new postings went into the moderation queue. However that ended up not being an ideal solution as I have to frequently check the moderation queue and genuine users have to wait for their posts to appear.

I eventually got around to looking for a better way and came across the SpamHammer plugin. To install it I first installed the autoMod component. I had to fix up three find nodes in the SpamHammer package being:

  • The cron.php,
  • The posting.php, and
  • The /language/en/acp/board.php.

The problem was they were using spaces instead of tabs. Cutting and pasting the text that was in the find node from the original php file fixed the problem up.

After installing I couldn’t find the SpamHammer configuration pages but a quick bit of reading and it’s locating at General->Posting->SpamHammer was revealed. I set a few likely options, removed the placement of new users into the newly registered groups and sat back to a hopefully spam free existence.

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