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Recently I’ve been seeing a shitload of Spambot signups and actual spam postings on my Coopersguns BodyBuilding forums

phpBB 3 had a little spam hiatus whilst the spammers cracked the new captcha system, however it’s obviously been well and truly broken now

I decided to clean the forums up and get rid of the spammers. I have employed 2 techniques:

1. A phpBB3 mod called daroPL_AntiSpam
2. Some code I quickly conjured up to check with Akismet when a comment is posted

I will obviously be talking about the latter here, follows are instructions on how to implement the Akismet check on posts:

If you want to copy & paste the following code snippets, hover over them and click the ‘copy’ button

1) Download akismet-php-curl-class
2) Copy the akismet.curl.class.php from the archive to your phpBB3 forum’s ‘includes’ folder (e.g. ~/public_html/forums/includes)
3) Edit message_parser.php in the ‘includes’ folder and make the following changes:

Find:

if (!class_exists('bbcode'))
{
        include($phpbb_root_path . 'includes/bbcode.' . $phpEx);
}

After it, insert the following

if (!class_exists('akismet')) {
        include($phpbb_root_path . 'includes/akismet.curl.class.' . $phpEx);
}

Find:

// Check number of links
if ($config['max_' . $mode . '_urls'] && $num_urls > $config['max_' . $mode . '_urls'])
{
	$this->warn_msg[] = sprintf($user->lang['TOO_MANY_URLS'], $config['max_' . $mode . '_urls']);
	return (!$update_this_message) ? $return_message : $this->warn_msg;
}

After it, insert the following:

// Akismet SPAM check
if (($user->data['user_posts']<=6) && ($user->data['user_type']==0)) {

	$akismet_comment = array(
	    'comment_type'              => 'comment',
	    'comment_author'            => $user->data['username'],
	    'comment_author_email'      => $user->data['user_email'],
	    'comment_author_url'        => $user->data['user_website'],
	    'comment_content'           => $this->message,
	);

	$akismet = new akismet('YOURAKISMETAPIKEYHERE','http://www.yourforums.com/forums');

	if(!$akismet->error) {

		if($akismet->valid_key()) {

			if($akismet->is_spam($akismet_comment)) {

				$this->warn_msg[] = $user->lang['AKISMET_SPAM'];
				$a_to = "you@youraddress.com";
				$a_subject = "Attempted SPAM Post by ".$user->data['username'];
				$a_body = $this->message;
				$a_headers = "From: admin@yourforums.com";
				mail($a_to, $a_subject, $a_body, $a_headers);

			}

		}

	}

}

4) Edit posting.php in the ‘language/en/’ folder (obviously you’ll need to add this to other languages your users use too)

Find:

        'TOO_FEW_CHARS'                         => 'Your message contains too few characters.',

After it, insert the following:

        'AKISMET_SPAM'                  => 'Your message looks like SPAM.',

5) Finished!