Mark's Blog

Simple message; if you’ve got phpBB installed somewhere, it’s time to update to 3.0.7.

It’s really, really easy these days so you have no excuses .

Another milestone clocked up for spammers across the world as the phpBB3 GD CAPTCHA has been officially cracked, causing an explosion of extra spam registrations and posts that most phpBB3 owners haven’t seen thus far. Unfortunately it was only a matter of time before the spammers’ automated tools were tailored to be able to read the phpBB3 CAPTCHA; however if you are keeping up with phpBB development you would have seen some interesting improvements going into trunk for 3.0.5 that hopefully will help with this spammer plague that we all seem to have come down with.

In another spammer experiment I’ve added another phpBB3 board with the GD CAPTCHA enabled on its default setting to the rotation script that governs which honeypot the spammers get sent to. The CAPTCHA settings are the same ones that are distributed with the phpBB (3.0.4) download package (GD set to on, foreground noise set to off, and X and Y noise set to 25).

Of course, I’d love nothing more than to present all of you with the opportunity to use bbProtection however we aren’t quite at that stage yet. However, now would be a great time to lend us a hand by contributing to our ongoing “bbProtection Needs You” campaign; more information available on that over at the bbProtection Blog .

It’s time to do the update dance again; Meik has announced the release of the phpBB 3.0.4 package.

We are very pleased to announce the availability of the “one year anniversary” phpBB 3.0.4 package. With this release we would like to thank everyone who supported phpBB the past years.

No exciting shiny new features in this release, however there are a number of bugfixes included alongside some performance enhancements.

As per usual, if you are starting a new board you’ll need the full package whereas if you are updating the automatic update package should suffice. If you have any problems then head over to the 3.0 support forum.

Remember: If you fail to update BertieZilla will come around and spread yummy honey all over you .

Meik has announced the availability of the phpBB 3.0.3 package over at phpBB.com. There are a couple of major new features, such as template inheritence as explained over at the phpBB Blog and a post based queue.

If you are starting a new board, you’ll want the 3.0.3 full package. Most people who are updating boards will require the automatic update package. If you are an advanced user there are also other options open to you. All of these packages can be found via the Olympus downloads page.

Remember, if you get stuck pop over to the very friendly people at the 3.0 support forum and I’m sure they will do their best to assist you in any way they can .

As some of you may already know, I’ve been running a honeypot for quite a while now to collect data for the bbProtection service as well as using it to monitor interesting spam patterns.

The pot is a basic install of phpBB3 without any modifications, and with user registration set to no authentication. There is currently one forum that spammers are able to leave messages in and a link to another pot run by Dave “drathbun” Rathbun. Dave’s pot currently has around 30,000 posts, an absolute mammoth amount of spam in the relatively short time that it has been set up.

So, it is with a little twinge of sadness that I report that the pot has reached 10,000 spam posts inside it. I suppose I am currently fortunate in the fact that I currently don’t have any boards of my own to run and so don’t really see the spam problem on a day-to-day basis. But for someone like Dave or any other board owner out there this is clearly a real problem.

Hopefully bbProtection will go a long way to solving this problem and allowing board owners to concentrate on running their communities rather than sorting out spam, but for now I’ll keep running the pot and see what flies in .