MuffinDCC and Themebot,

Happy Valentine's Day !

Hello I am feeling better and back to work on my site and class assignments.

Muffin, Thanks for the well wishes. It is really appreciated.

Themebot, I have several phpbb boards and am having less problems with bots and more problems with actual people posting spam. There is a setting in the configuration area of the phpbb administration panel that allows a setting for 'visual confirmation'. When this is set to on (or yes), anyone registering must type in a code (that is a graphic) in order to complete their registration. This will stop all spambots. Yet it will not stop 'real people' who register just to get a website posted to your memberlist.

I have not found any way to stop the real person spam other than to remove the register link (which I havn't found how to do that yet-but in theory it would work I think). MuffinDCC, you idea to redirect, could work for my open boards but, not for the private forums. Gives me something to think about for later set ups.

Themebot, I think it is correct that you need a mod to disable the registration however, I don't think you would need a mod to simply remove the 'register' link from the template...? Does that make sense?
The problem with doing that would be that administrators would need to manually add new members which would mean sorting through emails (unless there is a better way to do that).
The phpbb forums are very helpful usually. I have learned alot from them as well as dynamicdrive and open source openoffice.org

Back to the joomla board and joomla site. I would be delighted to post my site when it is a bit more ready for traffic. Thank you for providing this place to do that.

I am still unsure 'where' in the back end to post a category for the joomla board.
The message still says:

"There are no categories in the forum defined yet.

An administrator should create them first from the

Administration Panel of the Joomla! OS CMS"

'Where' would I Create a Category?

Kindest Regards,
GypsyOwl

There is no real way of making "real people" stop spamming. The only method that works is to have a team of moderators who "moderate" the board. Remember, moderators can delete, split, move and edit posts. They can also lock topics. Also, if you scan the phpbb site, you will see a MOD for a moderator control panle which gives them the ability to EDIT users - this could include banning. This is a great feature when you have a larger forum with public users.

Are all your forums linked with joomla or stand alone or both. I know in the configuration, you can set it for Admin approval so users can only post once being approved. For example, my website is for the Science department at my school. Only staff and students can register. Due to the users registering with their school login, i can quickly scroll down the user manager, clicking approve. I am not sure how this affects my phpbb (bridged) but it is something to consider.

Remember, you can ban users who are causing problems, and unban them when you deem it necessary, if ever.

As for removing the registration link, it just requires some little editing of the template. I shall be experimenting with seeing if i can still access forum registration with a direct link, if so i will attempt a further redirect to the main registration page.

If you need anymore help, feel free to post. Im sure someone will have an ide

Hi GypsyOwl. Happy Valentines Day!

Spambots are pretty smart these days and able to circumvent the image verification. I've got a collection of 16 spambot registrations on my phpBB demo site, they even auto fill the URL. But... since it is just a demo site I disabled posting and that's all they get, a link on the member list.

http://phpbb-2x.themebot.org/memberlist.php

I think it is quite possible you are dealing with spambots. Anyhow, here is an excellent thread on the phpBB forums for dealing with spam from both bots and humans:

Preventing SPAM - Bots and Humans

That was an insightful post, if i get spam bots, i may try some of those precautions

Hello, Hope you both had a great weekend. I realized that I may not have asked one of my questions clearly.

What feature in the joomlaboard control panel do I select in order to add a forum catogory to the joomla board? I have been in the Joomlaboard Control Panel (of my joomla site) I have a 'Category/Forum' listed. Maybe it isn't showing up on the site due to a wrong setting?

Today I added a new Category/Forum and still can not see it. I thought that the joomlaboard site was going to be helpful and I never received the activation email to allow me to access the installation manuel. (that would be helpful - Could someone share that with me? I will supply an email address if that is an option)


Great Resource Themebot!!! Thank You. Also, I hadn't thought about the possibility of bots having registered at the phpbb forums. It dosn't surprise me

Thanks for the support forum link. I will use that to trouble shoot the problem.

MuffinDCC Thank you! I am going to look for that MOD. I have several moderators who manage UserGroup memberships, edit and move posts etc. I didn't know that they could have access to the memberlist as well. That would be very helpful.

Welcome as a new member of my joomla site as well. You are officially the first member of the site. WELCOME!!! (now, do I need to activate you or is it automatice LOL - Seriously... )

Our school uses phpbb for one of the seminar forums. I noticed that they have bridged it to the student dashboard and the only way to register is through admin.

You asked about my forums? Most are stand alone phpbb. Only One is private. That is the one that I would like to remove registration from that forums menu. I would also like to hide the membership list so that only logged in 'active' members can see it. (that is not on the priority list yet but will be soon).


Hope all is well, I am going to work on a class assignment for about 20 hours this week. I'll be online very little in the process. Thanks again for all the wonderful resources. I hope that both of you will post information about your business' at my joomla site as soon as I get it up and running.

Kindest Regards,
GypsyOwl

Themebot should be able to help more than I, i recently tried joomlaboard on my demo website to give you some ideas but it ended up being a bunch of errors.

However, it should be easy to create categories:-

-Admin Panel
-JoomlaBoard
-Forum admin
-New
-To create a category - leave as top level categorie
-To create a forum section - scroll down the drop down box to where you want your forum section to appear
-i would recommend loading the sample data to give you a better idea