Off Topic Productions

I'm getting a wee bit tired of those goddamn adbots spamming our forums, I've removed 4 advertisements for various stupid crap these past two weeks, and Trestkon did some creative editing on another one, as you can see elsewhere on this board.

So now I've disabled guest posting. I apologize for any inconvenience that would create for any regular fans, but we encourage you to create an account if you wish to post on this board. If you have problems registering, please send an email to tnm at offtopicproductions dot com and tell us your account name, and we'll activate it for you.

oh yeah... my forum got tagged by them too, but an account-spam bot. for god sake there exists ip and mail banning.

But they were fun! Endless discussions of toothpicks.

I never read stickies.

justanotherfan wrote:But they were fun! Endless discussions of toothpicks.

I never read stickies.

You should SO be banned for reviving this amazingly dead thread

If you guys need a protection against spam bot registration in phpBB let me know - i'll post the code. It was written by Russian programmer, just a replacement of one file.

Dae wrote:If you guys need a protection against spam bot registration in phpBB let me know - i'll post the code. It was written by Russian programmer, just a replacement of one file.

Yes please!

Spammers have managed to make a special recognition system, which recognises symbols from CAPTCHA or whatever it's called. CAPTCHA is a visual confirmation image.

Here you can download a mod I was talking about. It improves CAPTCHA, makes it a lot more difficult for program recognition, but a human can understand it as good as the default one.

See the difference:

Default phpBB one:


Enhanced one:


The mod works on most of hosts but not on all. That's why before installation you need to backup usercp_confirm.php file from includes/ folder.
After backuping, extract files from the archive to your includes/ folder, with overwriting usercp_confirm.php.
When it's done, log out and check if a visual confirmation image works and shows up on registering page.

Hope it helps.

Works perfectly, Dae! Thanks a lot

*A funeral ode to toothpicks*

Hey do you mind if I forward a link of this to the admin at a forum I am a regular at that has a major problem with Spam bots?

warman wrote:Hey do you mind if I forward a link of this to the admin at a forum I am a regular at that has a major problem with Spam bots?

Why you ask? Of course. Less spam, the better the world is

Some people are still having troubles with not receiving their activation emails. I'm going to try shutting off user activation for now and see if the fancy new code Dae linked us to is enough to hold off the spambots.

I'm degrading this to a normal post because all announcements appear in every forum now, and it's taking up unnecessary space

ROFL 2 years ago.. man that was ages.