What Happened to the Ray Edwards Forum?
The forum was flooded with spam. There was so much of it coming through I had to shut it down (temporarily, I hope). I haven’t had time to go in and clean it out. I’m really sorry about it…there was a growing community in the forum, a lot of active discussion, and now I’m at a loss as to how to protect it from these spammers. Any suggestions would be welcome.
I was using phpbb. Is there another system I can use? A plugin for phpbb that will protect it? And if I change systems, is there an easy path for migrating all the old posts/users?
Hi Ray,
I would say use vBulletin, lot more secure and you can admin it very quickly and easily.
Options with the forum:
All new members are moderated (they post but you have to validate the post before it is visible to other visitors, if they are posting non suitable posts you can send them to coventry (put them in a user group that no one else can see, they post their messages they can see them and think everyone else can… but they can’t
so they then talk to themselves 
Or take on a couple of volunteer forum moderators, someone who is active in forums and can spare a couple of hours a week checking and pruning your board.
Heck right me a copy and ill setup and moderate it for 6 months for you!!
Ray,
You can install a mod in a matter of minutes to protect your forum from spam.
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=427852
Happy New Year
Mark
bbPress (by the WordPress gang) is another alternative, but probably not as robust as vBulletin.
Hi Ray,
I know!
You can use SMF (Simple Machines Forum).
http://www.simplemachines.org/
You can ban people with ip-adress, hostname, email-adress and/or username. You can ban people from posting in your Forum, and if you will, you can totally ban people from your forum so they can’t read, regist or write. Click the link below to read more about how to ban spammers:
http://docs.simplemachines.org/index.php?topic=145
Storm
Maybe you could try this:
The API is available for use. It’s possible someone has already created a phpbb plugin that uses it. (You can also use it on your Wordpress blog. It’s built in.)
http://akismet.com/
You can either install a patch for older versions or upgrade to a resent version. They are up to phpBB3 now.