Last time, we went over some tips on how to prevent your site from spamming by filtering out spammers during the registration process. But the issue remains if the spammers are already active and engaging on your community. And now the real question is: How to isolate them and eliminate their chances to annoy others? Fortunately, phpFox has the perfect answers to this question How to stop spamming on your phpFox community. By integrating 2 effective tools, phpFox allows you to control and reduce bots/spam effortlessly.
Let’s go over these useful tools to see how they work!
Spam Assistance
Spam Assistance primarily enables some additional spam-check features to your community. Admin has the flexibility to set a limit for each user behavior on site. From that preset standards, the system will check and mark any user with the violation. Then they will be temporarily dismissed from creating contents until Admin takes any further actions.
To enable the Spam Assistance you will need to login to your AdminCP >> Select Spam Assistance under Settings menu.
All of the features in this tool can help you to significantly reduce the amount of spam on your website. Admin can enable the Spam Checker and any additional checkers that will check posted comments from all users every few minutes and compare them for duplication. If there is any, this action will be counted as a spam instance from that user.
Admin can also set a certain amount of comments a user can post in a period of time and whitelist URLs and emails that you have verified as safe.
Above are some scenarios you can apply Spam Assistance to fight again spam on your site. Indeed, there are several other setting depends on your needs and demands. So go ahead and discover all these options and feel free to let us know if you have any inquiry about these.
Ban Filter
In most cases, phpFox supports you to detect the right spam target in a very clean and automated way. Ban Filter is a powerful tool for this. The setting offers options to allow the Admin to restrict the access to your community for certain members.
To configure the ban filters you will need to login to Admin CP >> Select Ban Filters from the Maintenance menu. You can choose to ban certain Usernames, Emails, IP addresses, Display names, and Words.
If you wish to ban a certain username from being used, you can do so by clicking on the Usernames section and then input that username. You can also manage all existing ban filters for usernames from here. Click on the Add button to add the username to the ban filter. Now when someone tries to make an account with that username he will not be able to do so.
Please note this rule is also applied to existing users. If you selected Yes on Ban User option, this will not only forbid the use of such username but also ban the user that is currently using it. The same rules are applied for ban filters of the email and display name.
When adding a ban filter on IP address, this will block all connections from that IP address to your website. If you selected Yes on the Ban User, this will automatically ban all existing accounts from that IP.
When you add words you wish to ban, you can choose a replacement for the word. This will replace all instances of that word on the entire website. This is an awesome feature if you want to restrict bad languages on your website. Again you can choose if you wish to ban the users that use that word or only to replace it.
That’s it. We hope with these 2 compelling tools: Spam Assistance & Ban Filter, your community will have an additional protection shield to fight against spams. Your site will be more reliable and full of useful contents without all the spams.
We appreciate all your feedback. So feel free to let us know your opinions on these tools to make them better!