How to easily stop PunBB spam

If you run a PunBB forum, you know how easy, light and fast it is. On the other hand, you probably also know how vulnerable it is to spam. Once your forum becomes a target, the speed with which spam appears is faster than the speed with which you can remove it despite of PunBB’s excellent user interface.

I recently got tired of this at our War Game Bunker forums, and looked for a solution to stop the spam. After digging through a list of PunBB plugins and addons, I found a simple way to combat both the forum message spam, a well as subscription spam, the two forms of PunBB spam that you are probably most familiar with.

1. Akismet for PunBB is a PunBB extension that uses the spam filtering service provided by Automattic, the company behind Wordpress (and bbPress, another excellent forum software). After installing it (you also need an Akismet API key, which is free), the messages posted on your forums are run through Akismet’s comprehensive spam filter, which I also use on all of my blogs. After I installed this to PunBB, all message spam stopped. The best thing about the extension is that for your peace of mind you can still review the blocked messages, thus enabling you to rescue messages that have been mistakenly marked for spam. Having said that, though, I have never encountered this problem during the two and a half years of using Akismet based spam filtering!

2. AntiBot, another PunBB extension, will meanwhile stop the PunBB registration spam, i.e. spambots from registering on your forums with suggestive names or homepage links. Note that AntiBot uses Captcha technology which, depending on your user base, may turn out to introduce accessibility problems to some, especially blind users. Perhaps in the future the release will include an audio Captcha to (partially) solve this problem, but in any case at this point I stick with AntiBot, as based on my experience it is the best way to stop PunBB registration spam.