MyBB bots – tips and MyBB plugins to prevent forum bot spammers.
Bots, the automated spammers that registers themselves on your growing MyBB forum with the only intention to advertise their own sites and create backlinks to them. Bots target specific forum softwares like SMF, vBulletin, etc to do this, in this case these are MyBB bots.
How can we stop them all? well we can’t, but there are many ways you can minimize alot of MyBB bots from registering on your forum using a combination of bot prevention MyBB plugins. Here’s a list of some great MyBB plugins to keep the MyBB bots away.
MyBB bots prevention plugins
stopforumspam.com for MyBB – Spam Prevention
This is a must have MyBB plugin for stopping most MyBB bots. When installed, it will check the massive stopforumspam.com database when a user tries to register on your board. You can choose the settings to check the username, IP address, email or all of them. If any of those options you chose matches the user in their database, the user will be denied registration. This plugin alone will stop 70% of the MyBB bots from getting onto your forum.
Fassim, although not as effective, is another excellent MyBB plugin to stop the wave of MyBB bots. Fassim comes with a few more options, being able to blacklist spamming ISPs, anonymous proxies, domains, countries and even regional areas (for US and Canada only). Fassim Anti Forum Spam checks the user based on your settings against it’s database, however it only blocks about 30% of known spammers. Fassim can work together with stopforumspam.com’s plugin for extra protection. You will a API key to use Fassim, click here to get yours.
Before the MyBB bots even have a chance to register, you can prevent some of them with reCAPTCHA. This CAPTCHA is more powerful than the standard MyBB CAPTCHA and it one of the most popular CAPTCHA services in general. Sign up with reCAPTCHA here to get the keys needed to use reCAPTCHA.
A simple but great MyBB plugin to have is Homepage Control. When MyBB bots register, one of the first things they’ll do is edit the website URL field in their User CP with their link, this will make it so that they must have a certain post count defined by you before it displays in their profile. Most bots don’t actually post on the forums, so this can effectively defeat the whole purpose of a bot. A minimum of 1-5 posts by a user before a website URL can be shown should work.
If you find a bot that has already registered and spammed your forum, and you want to clear them out quickly, then this is the MyBB plugin for you. Goodbye Spammer is true to it’s name, it erases almost everything from the spammer, including (but not limited) posts, threads, signatures, profile fields, etc, and you can also ban them there too. It’s a handy one-click removal of MyBB bots.
Extra MyBB bots prevention tips
1. For best results when fighting off MyBB bots, use all the plugins above, they will all work together and should not conflict.
2. After banning a bot, you can also ban it’s IP address in Admin CP too to ensure it will never return again. Same can be done with their email addresses.