Sciencemadness Discussion Board - One very easy way to reduce spam

One very easy way to reduce spam

Melgar - 22-8-2017 at 02:01

In the XMB installation folder:

Edit the /files/config.php file:

Change: $show_full_info = TRUE; to: $show_full_info = FALSE;

That will prevent the name and version of the forum software from being as frequent in the HTML source. Bots search for text like "Powered by XMB 1.9", which shows up in the TITLE of every single page. They then run an XMB-specific script, which will attempt to navigate to the signup page and create an account. Changing this setting won't affect things immediately, because a lot of bots have accounts already. But it will probably reduce bot prevalence to about half within a month.

If you want to reduce them by like 98%, I can write some custom PHP code for the signup page, but I'd need some way to debug it in a live environment.