entranceDisappearances board powered by smf. How to protect your Simple Machines (SMF) forum from spam
In case someone doesn't know, Simple Machines Forum - SMF for short - is, as the official website says, a free, professional-grade package that will allow you to organize your own online community in a few minutes. on this engine, you can see it here. I myself put my forum on it (by the way, go to FreeForum.biz).
It doesn't matter if a lot or a little spam appears on your forum. The important thing is that you are wasting your precious time on moderation. Setting up a plugin that will do all the work for you takes a few minutes, and it will save you a total of days and months, which will add up to the minutes you would spend erasing messages and deleting users.
I will notice that I tried to fight spammers on my own - I blocked access by IP and even by subnets. It really worked, eliminated a lot of garbage, but, nevertheless, once every one or two days someone made their way. And quite a lot of time was spent on replenishing the database of banned IPs. I thought that there should be more convenient way, and he really was found!
1. Installing and configuring Stop Spammer
In two weeks of operation, this plugin blocked 2202 fake users. Each of them would leave at least one message. Spammers are not going to slow down and every day I would spend time cleaning up my forum.
Instead, every few days I go to the user management page and see something like this:
I turn to the section "Awaiting approval" (these are the found spammers who are deprived of the opportunity to leave messages before their approval accounts administrator). I tick the box "Select all" and delete them with one click:
That's all, all spam accounts are sent into oblivion. Back to our list of users:
It can be seen that the list has noticeably thinned, but who are the rest? We select all and send them with one button for verification:
One "red" appeared, we immediately delete it. If you have free time, you can do others. If there is no time, then do nothing with new users - most of them will "blush" during subsequent checks. If you have time, you can go to their profiles and see - if there is a link in the signature - immediately banned, these are fake accounts of spammers who will never leave a single useful message.
I told you how to use this magic plugin, now I will tell you how to install it.
Download two files: language_full.zip (this language pack for plugin translation) and StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip (the number may be different, since the versions are updated). Unpack the contents of the StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip archive into some folder. Unpack the language_full.zip archive into the same folder, agree to replace the files. Now zip our folder.
In the admin panel, proceed to installing packages. Opposite the "Download package" inscription there is a button for selecting a file on your computer. Choose our new archive(where we replaced the language file), upload it to the forum and activate the package.
You're done!
Additional configuration of the plugin takes place in the admin panel: go to
Users → Registration → Setting
You can leave the default values there. There is also a field called "Your API Key". Without this key, you will not be able to report new spammers (but the plugin will work and filter known spammers). If you want to get your own API key, go to www.stopforumspam.com to register, and then enter the key here. If you have not received the key yet, leave the field blank. Then the default key will be used.
2. Installing and configuring Anti-Spam Links
The adherents of the SEO religion (you can see more about my attitude towards SEO-nists in another) have a firm conviction that by increasing the number of links to their site, they "promote" it (for some reason, the idea of creating interesting and high-quality content for none of it never occurs to them). There would be a sucker, but there would be ways to get money out of him. So, some "citizens" provide services for "running" sites on forums. They create a large number of accounts on different forums and insert backlinks there in signatures and in other available fields. Despite the fact that even "seo-experimenters" have already empirically proven that there is zero sense from these links, some warn that for this you can get a ban from search engines Yandex, for example, simply ignores links on ALL forums and sites where anyone can post links. Google also has similar algorithms - ignoring links in comments, etc. But the law is not written to suckers ... Therefore, we, the owners of forums, have to reckon with the facts that “cool SEO-optimizers” order a “run” of their shitty things for a thousand rubles.
The Stop Spammer plugin will filter out a lot. But we can help him! You can knock out the interest of spammers to post links on your forum. This is what is needed for Anti-Spam Links... This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does so:
- those who, for example, have less than five messages, cannot leave links at all
- those who, for example, have less than 15 messages, cannot leave active links, http: // is removed from the links and in general these links become nubolinks (newbielink)
- those with, for example, less than 50 posts can leave active links, but all links receive the nofollow attribute.
- well, those with more than 50 posts can insert the most common active links that transfer the site's weight to the page they link to.
Believe me, would-be SEOs are very attentive to the form in which their link gets to the site. They'll lose interest in your forum very quickly if they can't easily post their shit-links to their shit-sites there.
Yes, by the way, the above rules also work in fields such as signatures.
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 panel, go to the package installation (as you did with the previous package) and install it. There is no language file for this package, so you don't need to unpack the archive or do anything with it.
To configure the plugin, go to the section
Configuration → Configuring Mods ... → Configuring Mods
If you wish, put down how many messages the user should have to upgrade their capabilities.
Conclusion
These two plugins will make your life VERY easy for you, the forum owner, and will save you a lot of time. Nevertheless, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, it is necessary to “thin out” users and delete spam messages. So don't throw your web resources away!
Everyone knows that I simply cannot live without Joomla, but, in my opinion, there is no good forum in components. That's why I work with forum engines. One of the new ones that I just recently started using is Starting a new SMF category, hopefully with useful material... We start small, and as a beginner, very useful.
First steps in search engine optimization Simple Machines Forum: remove copyright and external links
I'll make a reservation right away that I'm only working with smf 2 and this article will refer specifically to this version of the free forum engine.
And so, regular readers know how much I do not like to put on "10" external links to the official sites of engines, including forum ones. That is why, first of all, we delete the copyright and as many as 4, attention 4 external links of the form " SMF 2.0.2 | Simple Machines | SMF © 2011 | XHTML"! To do this, connect to the site via FTP forum / Themes / name of your theme/ and edit the file index.template.php... Naturally, at the very bottom there is a code (about 330 lines), which is displayed by external links that we do not like so much. Therefore, we delete: "
What engines do successful forums use? What servers do they run on? In what encoding are messages written by users stored? Will the encrypted HTTP protocol S good old HTTP?
The study uses the statistics of the "Rating of the forums of Runet, Uanet and Bynet". This rating contains over 400 of the largest Russian-language (over 1 million messages), Ukrainian-language (over 50 thousand messages) and Belarusian-language (over 2 thousand messages) forums.
As you can see from the diagram, the paid engines Invision Power Board (now IPS Community Suite) and vBulletin are competing for the first place. At the same time, the leader, albeit by a small margin, is still IPB.
Free phpBB, distributed under the GNU GPL license, is in third place with a slight lag. In addition to him, SMF (Simple Machines Forum) is also quite popular - the heir to YaBB SE, which in turn traces its history from YaBB to Perl. This engine is also free, but unlike phpBB it is licensed BSD.
Of particular note is the paid XenForo, whose first public beta release took place in October 2010, and the first stable version was released on March 8, 2011. Despite being paid for and strong competition, he managed to get into the top five most popular engines. Moreover, some forums have abandoned the previously used software and switched to XenForo. The largest of these is the BMW Club, with over 27 million posts. He previously worked for paid vBulletin.
Interestingly, some large projects use forum services - mainly forums free hosting uCoz.
The use of old engines, such as IkonBoard 2 (Ru.Board computer forum) or YaBB 1 (Absolute Games Forums Central), is due to the large age of these forums, as well as, apparently, the conservatism of administrators and / or users who do not want to switch to modern software... In addition, these forums have been heavily modified and bear little resemblance to the original IkonBoard and YaBB.
As you can see from the table, over 2/3 of all major forums use nginx. True, this percentage includes not only forums running on pure nginx, but also using it as a front-end to another server (usually Apache). Such high popularity of nginx on large forums is due to its stable work on high-load projects.
Only about 16% of forums run on pure Apache.
Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) is even less prevalent. Less than 2% of forums use it. The largest of these is the SQL.ru forum, which contains over 19 million posts.
A significant part of the forums from the item "Other or not defined" are sites that use services to protect against DDoS attacks - CloudFlare, Qrator, DDoS-GUARD.
Among encodings, not surprisingly, UTF-8 is the leader. Surprisingly, Windows-1251 barely lags behind it. But this is not unusual, if you remember that the statistics take into account the largest forums. And the largest are, as a rule, rather old forums, created back in the days of dial-up, when every byte was counted. It is worth recalling that Cyrillic characters occupy 2 bytes in UTF-8, while in Windows-1251 and KOI8-R - 1 byte each.
Even more interesting is that there are still forums that use the KOI8-R encoding. Among the largest are Farit.ru (over 8 million posts), the HiTV Portal Conference (over 2 million posts) and the Kuking Culinary Forum (over 1 million posts).
In recent years, there has been a gradual transition of sites to secure HTTPS (Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure). Its main advantage is encryption of all transmitted traffic.
Previously, HTTPS was used only for certain parts of some sites where secure data transmission was really required (for example, Internet banking). But over time, ordinary sites began to switch to HTTPS. Among the largest are Google, Yandex, Wikipedia, Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki.
This trend also affected the forums. So, today more than 10% of the largest forums use the HTTPS protocol, and their number is constantly growing. This may be partly due to the more favorable attitude towards such sites on the part of Google ("Google boosts sites with HTTPS in the SERP").
Nevertheless, about 90% still continue to work on the HTTP protocol.
As a bonus, the article added statistics on PHP versions installed on the servers of the largest forums. Surprisingly, over 1% of forums continue to use PHP 4! PHP 5.3 remains the most popular version, and new PHP 7 is installed on only 2 forums.
This conservatism can be explained by the fact that large forums usually run on dedicated servers. And administrators are usually slow to update software unnecessarily.
Conclusion
Summing up, the following trends can be identified among the largest forums of Runet, Uanet and Bynet over the past few years:- the most popular engines are paid IPB and vBulletin;
- transition of some forums to the new commercial engine XenForo;
- using the nginx server, as well as services to protect against DDoS attacks;
- slow transition to UTF-8 encoding while maintaining serious positions in Windows-1251;
- the vast majority of forums are still using the HTTP protocol, but there is a gradual transition to HTTPS.
Tours and holidays in Australia
Internet forums are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is understandable, since forums are an ideal platform for free communication of visitors. A forum is a great way to organize a community on your site and build a consistent audience of visitors.
There are many forum engines out there. I have long wanted to review the forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is a topic for a separate article.
When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine the following points for yourself:
1. What functionality of the forum do you need. Most forum engines are very powerful, but some of the nuances are not implemented in all forum CMS. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and getting familiar with detailed description functional.
2. Paid or free engine - this point must also be taken into account. In this review, there are only two paid engines - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.
3. Community development - when the engine has a developed community both in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet, this is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, improvements and design templates. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many issues will have to be solved on their own.
4. Date of the last engine update - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers are not developing it or have abandoned further development. This is a big disadvantage. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and a forum with outdated functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development.
Okay, enough big words 🙂. I'll start with the most popular forum engines based on this CMS ranking.
This is my favorite forum engine, and I keep my forum Planet Photoshop on this engine. The reason is not only that it is a free forum engine, but also that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both in the English-speaking Internet and in the Russian Internet, so a lot of mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with which you can further expand the functionality.
Logs of actions of the user, moderator, administrator, precise settings of the access rights of the moderator and administrator, identification of search robots, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and private messages - these are just a part of phpBB's functionality.
I also really like the direction in which phpBB is evolving from version to version. phpBB is convenient for both administrator and moderators and regular users.
My opinion for several years of using phpBB is that it is a wonderful forum engine that is not demanding on hosting resources and provides all the necessary potential for running a forum.
Useful phpBB resources:
Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in runet. Many well-known forums work on it. Has developed communities in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet.
For IPB there are additional official apps(gallery, blog, file archive module). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a text version of the forum, optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, a detailed log of actions of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of actions of search robots.
Useful Invision Power Board Sites:
🔥 By the way! I run a paid course on SEO Shaolin English Website Promotion. If you are interested, you can apply on his website seoshaolin.com.vBulletin is a great forum engine. It is paid, you can find out the cost. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines.
Support for podcasting, automatic generation of forum RSS feed, the ability for visitors to create social groups and clubs of interest on the forum, user photo galleries, tags are supported, the ability to add forum topics to social bookmarks by users themselves - these are the most interesting features of vBulletin, in my opinion.
punBB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is user-friendly and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is compensated by the speed of its work and undemanding hosting resources.
PunBB developers focus on lightness, speed and compactness.
Useful punBB resources:
YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB does not use a database to store data, but files.
Comfortable text editor for writing messages, ample opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates "on the fly", the ability to convert the page to a "printable version" - these are not all the features of the YaBB forum engine.
Now a little digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that give a good effect for increasing targeted traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I showed 10 profitable young sites from different topics as an example, how they are being promoted and described how it can be used to promote their resources.
SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to server resources and is actively gaining popularity.
OpenID support, user warnings, the ability to premode topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that's not all that SMF allows!
Intellect Board is an original free engine. The idea of the Intellect Board developers is the idea to create a website based on the forum. Intellect Board functionality is very wide - a collection of articles, presentation, news, file archive, photo gallery, IRC chat, encyclopedia. In fact, Intellect Board is a full-fledged content management system.
Main features of Intellect Board - Ability to set rules for all sections, support for graphic libraries GD and GD2 for creating thumbnail copies of pictures and photos, the ability to issue warnings and rewards by moderators and administrators (moreover, warnings can be both unlimited and limited in time), rating topics, articles, files and photos /
ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board)
ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It 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, a high degree of resistance to hacking, the forum works on files, no databases are required, for its work it is enough to have php support on the hosting.
Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modularity. A big plus of this forum CMS is that most of the modules are installed in one click
Pros of Vanilla: its own framework that allows you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (votes, tag clouds, blogs, chat, karma-like add-ons, etc.), ease of installation of add-ons (in most cases, uploaded, pressed one button - and that's it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to additions, of which about 450 have been written now.
Another one interesting feature The Vanilla forum engine - the "Whisper" system - you can simply send someone a message in a whisper without leaving the topic page, or create a "whisper" topic that will be a visual history of the correspondence.
Let "s not forget good old forum software. Geeks use them for tech support. Businesses use them for collaboration. Here" s our take on 70+ forum engines, hosts, and tools.
Forum Engines (Free Software)
Pocoo - Never heard of a Python-powered board? Neither did I, until I found Pocoo. It "s WSGI compatible, and has an advanced plugin system.
PunBB - With XHTML-compliant pages, simplicity, and speed, what "s not to like?
Quicksilver Forums (QSF) - Based on the now dead MercuryBoard, QSF has grown into a mature engine sporting features such as 3D permissions or skinning.
RForum - Strong forum with mailing list integration, powered by Ruby.
Simple Machines Forum (SMF) - Originally a fork of YaBB SE, SMF features WYSIWYG, powerful groups, and much more. Note: there is some dispute about whether SMF is free software or not, since you are not allowed to redistribute the forum / software itself without written permission.
Snitz - Basic ASP forum.
Tiny forum that stores its information in TXT files instead of a database.
Unclassified NewsBoard Forum (UNB) - Easy to use forum engine with Jabber notification.
UseBB - Lightweight, clear, and efficient board package.
Vanilla - Terrific AJAXified forum with a really nice look you won "t find anywhere else.
Vikingboard - Minimalistic board engine for high performance.
Viscacha - Board with integrated CMS and conversion from CuteCast, Vision Board, phpBB, and WBB.
YaBB - Easy to install and easy to use, YaBB is more than yet another bulletin board.
Yazd - Basic forum engine under the Apache license.
Forum Engines (Commercial)
AspNetForum - Clean and powerful ASP.NET forum engine. $ 85- $ 169.
Burning Board - Easy to set up board that will import existing Invision Power Board, MyBB, phpBB, PunBB, Simple Machines Forum, or vBulletin forums. $ 139.99- $ 269.99.
FuseTalk - Powerful forum software used by big-names such as Adobe, Boeing, NASA, NBC, US Airforce, McAfee and Lonely Planet. But the names will cost you. $ 649- $ 4599.
FusionBB - Calendar, photo gallery, PayPal, article templates, and much more are available with this great piece of software. $ 425 flat fee or $ 149 flat fee and $ 39 / year.
Ideal BB - ASP / COM board with a nice revision feature. $ 299- $ 2099.
Invision Power Board (IPB) - One of the most popular commercial boards of all time. $ 149.99- $ 299.99.
Jive Forums - Powerful board used by companies such as EA and ESPN. Unfortunately, very expensive. $ 14,950 flat fee, $ 1950/1000 users, $ 4950/5000 users, or $ 9950 / 20,000 users.
MyProBB - Powerful anti-spam features makes this one a keeper. It "s cheap, too. $ 25 / year.
UBB.threads - $ 725 flat fee or $ 229 flat fee and $ 125 / year.
vBulletin - Extremely popular board with tons of features. $ 160 flat fee or $ 85 / year.
WowBB - WYSIWYG, internationalization, and much more available with this PHP board... $ 99 flat fee or $ 55 / year.
Forum Hosts
Blursoft MetaForum - Has a ton of AJAX features, but manages to stay search friendly. And yes, the back button does work. Free.
Conforums - Unlimited categories, boards, and posts with HTML and JavaScript customization. Free.
CuteCast - Basic forum hosting. Free.
GoBoardz - Nice forum with photo sharing and a nice interface. Free.
Hyperboards - A big hosting provider with global login (one Hyperboards account logs you into every Hyperboards forum), skins, pages, and unlimited posts and boards. Free.
Invision Power Board (IPB) - One of the most popular commercial boards of all time. $ 10- $ 75 / month.
ProBoards - A well known host powered by YaBB. Free.
Sudden Launch - Forum host with unlimited posts, replies, and boards. Free.
WowBB - WYSIWYG, internationalization, and much more available with this PHP board. $ 99 flat fee and $ 3.95 / month or $ 7.95 / month.
Forum Integration
bbPress and Wordpress integration - Official howto on integrating the two sister projects.
Joomla component that adds a powerful forum.
Integrating Vanilla and Wordpress - Official guide to integrating the two popular CMSs.
IpbWiki - Connects Invision Power Boards and MediaWiki.
Joomla! Vanilla - Bridge between the Joomla CMS and Vanilla.
Forum Tools
BBCodeXtra Firefox Extension - Context menu to insert BBCode or (X) HTML. Freeware.