Securing phpbb2

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 4:50 pm

I installed a phpbb2 forum to save space on one of my accounts. I also wanted to take advantage of the many, many forum hacks available. I am not a coder so I have great difficulty converting these hacks to work on phpnuke's forums.

Anyway, I am getting many email messages from my server saying an email was undeliverable because of an invalid email address. Most of these are email address' such as username.ru . I have captcha set up so people have to register with a confirmation code to get the activation email sent out, so I assume they are actually visiting my site - not using bots.

Any way to stop these .ru guys before they try registering? I know NukeSentinel can stop them in phpnuke but how about the stand alone phpbb2?

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 5:47 pm

You might be better off asking on the PHPbb forums. NS can do it easily with the string blocker but as you indicate it doesn't run with standalone PHPBB.

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 5:48 pm

You can add email adresses,IPs, Hostnames, etc. under ban in the forums administration and beneed this there are a lot of different ban mods available.

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 7:02 pm

THanks, I did. However, my experience is that no forum community responds like this one does. I have posted questions on other site's forums and never gotten any response, so I guess I'm hedging my bets.

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 10:40 pm

We would have to see what these emails look like, but my guess is that your domain has been spoofed. Do you know if these emails really are coming from your server?
It is very easy to fake a return address and have spammers emails bouncing back to you.

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 10:43 am

I am blind. Somehow, accound activation was set to 'none'. I have reset it to 'user' and will see how it goes.

Thanks