Free forum software with a good spam protection

Question

About a week ago I had to pull the plug on my PhpBB forums because spam had reached totally unmanageable levels:

The database contained well over 300,000 spam topics & messages, for a total of 8 Gb of junk. None of it was displayed on the website, as the forum was on a strict moderation queue, so there was no point to it, but the volume was such that moderation was plain impossible.

Now, I am considering my options for a new forum.

My requirements are:

• PHP or easy to install on a typical
• LAMP hosting Free Really good spam protection.
• Easy to customize & integrate in my website
• Reasonably stable & fast
• Easy to manage

PhpBB was good, but the SPAM problem was so bad that the forum never had a chance to really get anywhere.

I have been looking around at similar questions, but there are very little info regarding the quality of their anti-spam features.

Answer 1

There are a lot of tools to stop spam in and around PhpBB.

• Require registration to post
• Require email validation to register
• Use a CAPTCHA on the registration form
• Use Akismet to filter posts coming through (there are a lot of other mods than the one I linked to).
• Use moderate-first-post (can't remember if it's built in or an add-on)

But if you're looking for something faster and perhaps a little simpler, PunBB is popular and a fork of it, FluxBB is growing in popularity (since the PunBB brand was bought by "the man").

They are a lot faster and lighter on resources but you do trade in quite a lot of community resources, plugins, and built-in features for that.

I implemented FluxBB in a client's site, as viewable here just to show you that it can be fairly tightly integrated into a site's design. In this case the main site is a Wordpress install.

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Just noticed your comment on your opening post. I don't think there are any plug-ins, importers or anything really that will automatically cut down existing spam.

Most spam is very similar. Unless you've been targeted by multiple spammers, you might be able to write a little PHP script to look for known spam signatures and delete them (and their users) automatically.

This should get you back to a point where you can manually moderate quite quickly.

Answer 2

Have you tried punbb? It has good spam and xss protection.

Answer 3

I have added reCAPTCHA to a phpBB forum for user registration and additionally run reCAPTCHA plus a very simple blacklist filter handwritten into the phpBB code on posting attempts from unregistered users, and the spam levels are minimal.