phpBB is an open-source forum soft­ware that is very pop­u­lar and widely used. This makes it an ideal tar­get for spam­mers. The phpBB de­velopers there­fore im­ple­men­ted an im­proved Captcha in ver­sion 3.0. But spam­mers have already ad­ap­ted to this and have im­ple­men­ted im­proved bots that are able to break the new Captcha and to auto­mat­ic­ally cre­ate junk posts. In the fol­low­ing I will de­scribe five anti-spam meas­ures that ef­fect­ively re­duce spam in every phpBB 3.x in­stance. The main goal of these meas­ures is to block as many spam posts as pos­sible without af­fect­ing nor­mal forum users.

Measure #1: links

Question: New users are registered, but seems they can not post.

Answer: Try the following indications.

1) Permissions

Check the following

Admin panel

permissions

groups forum permissions

registered users

the forums

standard access

2) Languages

If you're not using the default British English language you need to make sure you've upload the correct style imageset for the one you are using.

If you're using US English you can duplicate the imageset/en folder and rename it to /en_us