Is anyone else responsible for a phpBB message board?

[lovingboth]

I'll post this somewhere else as well, but...

I offered to help one recover from spammers (mostly spam registrations rather than posts, fortunately), and it's an uphill task.

It was running a vanilla 1.0.22 phpBB setup. I've added a MOD to make deleting users easier (as a result, it's gone from about 480 to 30 'real' users plus about 10 others I'm not sure about but which aren't doing anything naughty). I've made a couple of changes to the registration process to catch out stupid scripts. I've made registration spam pointless (now you don't even appear in the user list until an admin says so) but of course, they're still doing it... to the tune of about ten a day.

I'm about to do another tweak to catch out about half of those, but I'd like to get it down to a maximum of one a day.

I can see that the standard CAPTCHA has been completely cracked - is it worth changing to a more robust one? (Either something that's not OCRable or the 'here are 20 pictures, which ones are kittens and which cars?' type.)

Or do I just say 'sod it' and suggest they move to SMF?

Comments

[jensolo.livejournal.com]

I have a phpBB but I'm such a beginner use that I remove everything by hand, pretty much one at a time. Not looking forward to it again this year. Especially as it's not an active site, it's just an archive walk down memory lane.

[lovingboth]

What looks to have worked is upgrading the CAPTCHA (not to the one above, but it seems good enough) plus rejecting registations from 'users' who give info (IM contact details) when they're told not to.