Nursing Profile Powered by SMF. How to protect your forum on Simple Machines (SMF) from spam. Installing and configuring STOP SPAMMER

Hello, Habravchan!

Most recently, I was puzzled by the idea of \u200b\u200bcreating a forum. Now the creation of the forum does not cause a lot of work for users, since there is a sufficiently large number of ready-made forum CMS, which greatly facilitate the execution of this task. But among their abundance, it is very difficult to choose the really necessary CMS. Therefore, I decided to write my own review, which is at least a little bit, but may help the user to make a choice towards a particular engine.

Free engines

#1 - Punbb.
Beautiful and easy to use engine. Comfortable and intuitive administrative panel interface. The forum is very compact, has a small number of functions (with under the box), but it can easily be corrected by add-ons. Convenient and easy to create themes. If you need simple and easy to install, configure and use the forum is the perfect choice.
- Russian community

There are still many different engines that I did not include in the review, for I believe that they are not so in demand and popular as mentioned above. As for my subjective opinion, I would recommend PUNBB or Xenforo.

Tags: Create Forum, Forum CMS, Forum Engine

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If someone does not know, Simple Machines Forum - for brevity SMF is, as it is stated on the official website, a free, professional level package, which will allow you to organize your own online community in a few minutes. On this engine, you can see here. I myself set my forum on it (by the way, come in freeforum.biz).

No matter, a lot or little spam appears on your forum. It is important that you spend your precious time to moderation. Setting the plugin that will do all the work for you takes a few minutes, and it will save you, in total, days and months, which will be collaborated from those minutes that you would spend on erasing messages and delete users.

I note that I tried to fight my own spammers - blocked IP access and even at subnets. It really worked, sifled a lot of garbage, but, nevertheless, once in one or two days someone made his way. And quite a long time went on replenishing the base of the banned IP. I thought that there should be a more convenient way, and he really found!

1. Installing and configuring STOP SPAMMER

For two weeks of work, this plugin blocked 2202 fake users. Each of them would leave, for a minimum, one post. Spammers are not going to slow down turnover and every day I would spend time on clearing your forum.

Instead, once a few days I go to the user management page, I see there something like this:

I turn to the section "Expect approval" (this is the found spammers that are deprived of the opportunity to leave messages before approving their accounts by the administrator). I put a tick "to allocate all" and remove them with one click:

That's all, all spam accounts are sent to unprecedented. Return to our list of users:

It can be seen that the list was noticeable, but who is the rest? We highlight all and send one button to check:

One "red" appeared, I immediately delete it. If you have free time, you can do others. If there is no time, do not do anything with new users - most of them are "blushing" with subsequent checks. If you have time, you can go to their profiles and see if there is a link in the signature - immediately in the ban, these are fake spammers that will never leave a single useful message.

I told how to use this magic plugin, now I will tell you how to install it.

Download two files: language_full.zip (this is a language package for translation plugin) and StopSPAMMER_V2_3_9.zip (the number may be different, since the versions are updated). Unpack the contents of the archive stopspammer_v2_3_9.zip in some folder. In the same folder, unpack the Language_full.zip archive, agree to replace the files. Now pack our folder to the zip archive.

In the admin step, go to the installation of packages. Opposite the "Download Package" inscription there is a button to select a file on a computer. Choose our new archive (where we replaced the language file), unload it to the forum and activate the package.

That's all ready!

Additional setting of the plugin occurs in the admin: Go to

Users → Registration → Setup

You can leave the default values \u200b\u200bthere. Even there there is the "Your API key" field. Without this key, you will not be able to report new spammers (but the plugin will work and filter well-known spammers). If you want to get your own API key, go to the website www.stopforumspam.com for registration, and then specify the key here. If you have not received the key, leave the field empty. Then the default key will be used.

2. Installing and configuring Anti-Spam Links

At the Adepts of the Seo Religion (more about my attitude to Seo-Nists can see in another) there is a solid conviction that increasing the number of references to your site, they "promote it" (for some reason the idea of \u200b\u200bcreating interesting and high-quality content to anyone from They do not occur). There would be a sucker, and ways to pull out money from it will be found. So, some "citizens" provide services on the "run" sites on the forums. They create a large number of accounts on different forums and insert back links in the signatures and in other available fields. Despite the fact that even "CEO experimenters" has proven to be experienced, the lot from these links is zero, some warn that it is possible to get a ban from search engines, Yandex, for example, just ignores links to all forums and sites where any can Leave links. Google also has similar algorithms - ignoring references in comments, etc. But the law is not written, the law is not written ... Therefore, we, owners of forums, have to be reckoned with those facts that "steep seed optimizers" for a thousand rubles are ordered by "run" of their befickers.

A lot of Stop Spammer plugin. But we can help him! You can knock out from under the legs of spammers, it is of interest to post links on your forum. It is for this that you need Anti-Spam Links. This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does so:

• those who, for example, less than five posts, can not leave links at all
• those who, for example, less than 15 messages, can not leave active links, is removed from the link http: // and generally these links become Nubolinki (newbielink)
• those who, for example, less than 50 messages can leave active links, but all links receive the Nofollow attribute.
• well, those who have more than 50 messages can insert the most common active references that transmit the weight of the site page to which they refer.

Believe me, the grief-optimizers are very closely related to what form their link hits the site. They will quickly lose interest to your forum, if you can not easily leave your shit and links there to your shit sites there.

Yes, by the way, the rules above work in these fields as a signature.

To install this plugin, go to its official page. Download the ANTI_SPAM_LINKS_V1.0.1.zip archive (the number may be different). Again in the forum admin. Scroll to install packages (how it was done with the previous package) and install it. There is no language file for this package, so you do not need to unpack the archive or something with it.

To configure the plugin, go to the section

Configuration → Modov Setup ... → Setting up modifications

At your own desire, it is necessary to stand up how many messages must have a user to upgrade its capabilities.

Conclusion

These two plugins greatly facilitate you, the owner of the forum, life and save a lot of time. However, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, you need to "rush" users and delete spam messages. So do not throw your web resources!

Tours and rest in Australia

Online forums are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is quite explained, as the forums are the perfect platform for free communication of visitors. The forum is an excellent way to organize the community on your site and to form a permanent audience of visitors.

There are many forum engines. I have long wanted to check the forum engines. I will not compare them - this is the topic of a separate article.

When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine for yourself the following points:

1. What functions of the forum you need. Most of the forum engines have wide opportunities, but some nuances are not implemented in all forum CMS. I recommend to visit the official sites of the engines and get acquainted in the detailed description of the functionality.

2. A paid or free engine - this moment should also be considered. In this review, only two paid engines - VBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.

3. The development of the community - when the engine has a developed community both in English-speaking and in the Russian-speaking Internet, it is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, refinement and design templates. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many moments will have to be solved on their own.

4. Date of the last update of the engine - if the engine is not updated for a long time, it suggests that developers do not develop or abandoned further development. This is a big minus. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and the forum with obsolete functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development.

Okay, there is enough loud words 🙂. I will start with the most popular forum engines, based on this CMS rating.

This is my favorite forum engine, and I keep my own forum Planet Photoshop on this engine. The reason is not only that this is a free forum engine, but also that it has a wide functionality, has developed communities both in the English-speaking Internet and in RuNet, so for PHPBB has developed many mods for every taste with which you can Even more to expand the functionality.

User actions, moderator, administrator, accurate moderator and administrator access rights settings, search robots identification, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and personal messages - just part of the PHPBB functional.

I also like the way in what direction phpbb is developing from version to version. PHPBB is convenient for both the administrator and moderators and ordinary users.

My opinion over several years of use PHPBB is a wonderful forum engine, not demanding to hosting resources, and providing all the necessary potential for maintaining the forum.

Useful PHPBB resources:

Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine, which is very popular on the Internet. Cost in RuNet can be found. It employs many well-known forums. It has developed communities in the English-language and Russian-speaking Internet.

For IPB, there are additional official applications (Gallery, Blog, File Archive Module). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a textual version of the forum optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, a detailed log of administrators and moderator actions, as well as a log of search robots.

Useful sites on Invision Power Board:

🔥 By the way! I spend a paid course to promote English-speaking sites SEO Shaolin. If you are interested, you can apply on its seoshaolin.com website.

vBulletin is a wonderful forum engine. It is paid, the cost can be found. Along with IPB, VBulletin is a leader among paid engines.

Podcasting support, automatic generation of RSS FIDID FORUM, the possibility of creating visitors to social groups and clubs in the forum on the forum, gallery of users of users, supported tags, the ability to add the forum to social bookmarks by users themselves - the most interesting features of VBulletin, in my opinion.

punbB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is convenient and intuitive. PUNBB has fewer opportunities, but it is compensated by the speed of its work and inconspicuous to hosting resources.

PUNBB developers make focus on lightness, speed and compactness.

Useful PUNBB resources:

Yabb is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, Yabb to store data does not use a database, but files.

Convenient text editor for writing messages, wide opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates "on the fly", the ability to convert the page to the "version for printing" - that's not all the possibilities of the Yabb forum engine.

Now a slight digression. If you are interested in learn about those methods of promotion, which give a good effect to increase target attendance, then I can offer my paid study of SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I on the example of 10 profitable young sites from different subjects showed, How they are moving and described how this can be used to promote their resources.

SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to the server resources and is actively gaining popularity.

OpenID support, user alerts system, it is possible if necessary to prey themes, messages and attachments, WYSIWYG editor for messages - and this is not all that SMF allows!

Intellect Board - original free engine. The idea of \u200b\u200bthe developers of the Intellect Board is idea to create a website based on the forum. The functional Intellect Board is very wide - a collection of articles, presentation, news, file archive, photo gallery, IRC chat, encyclopedia. In fact, the Intellect Board is a full-fledged site management system.

The main features of the Intellect Board are the ability to set the rules for all sections, supporting GD and GD2 graphic libraries to create reduced copies of pictures and photos, the ability to make warnings and encouragements by moderators and administrators (and warnings can be both indefinite and limited time), rating Topics, articles, files and photos /

EXBB (EXCLUSIVE BULLETIN Board)

EXBB is an easy and free forum engine. He also, like Yabb, does not require a database and stores information in text files.

EXBB has the following advantages: Pages are generated very quickly, the load on the server is minimal, the high degree of hazard sustainability, the forum is working on files, databases are not required, it is enough to work in the hosting to support PHP.

Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modulosis. Big plus this forum CMS - most modules are installed in one click

Pros Vanilla: Own framework, allowing you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (voting, tag clouds, blogs, chat, carmaken additions, etc.), the convenience of installing additions (in most cases flooded, pressed one button - and that's all!), Extensibility of standard functional (modularity) by add-ons that are now written about 450.

Another interesting feature of the Vanilla's forum engine is a whisper system - you can simply send someone to someone with a whisper, without leaving the topic page or create the topic "whisper", which will be a visual correspondence story.

Let's start immediately from the main script code:

#! / usr / bin / perl

# Which-Forum.pl script
# (C) 2010 Alexandr A Alexeev, http: // Site /

use Strict;

# Commented lines - for rigor
# If the task is to collect the statistics of the engines, leave as it is
# If you make a list of forums - Rassate

mY $ DATA;
$ Data. \u003d $ _ While (<> ) ;

# Check how much it was powered by phpbb without reference in the basement
print "phpbb. \\ n "
if ($ Data \u003d ~ /] + href \u003d "[^"] * http: \\ / \\ / (?: www \\.)? phpbb \\ .com \\ /? "[^\u003e] *\u003e PHPBB / I Or.
# $ Data \u003d ~ /ViewForum\\.php\\?[ ^""**F\u003d\\D+/i OR
$ Data \u003d ~ / PHPBB \\ -SEO / I OR
$ Data \u003d ~ /) ;
print "IPB \\ n "
if ($ Data \u003d ~ /] + href \u003d "[^"] * http: \\ / / / (?: www \\.)? INVISION (?: Board | Power) \\. Com \\ /? [^ "] *" [^\u003e] *\u003e [^.<]*IP\.Board/i Or.
$ Data \u003d ~ /] + href \u003d "[^"] * http: \\ / \\ / (?: www \\.)? INVISIONBOARD \\ .com \\ /? "[^\u003e] *\u003e INVISION POWER BOARD / I Or.
$ Data \u003d ~ /