One of many podcasts that I currently subscribe to is the Geek News Central podcast by Todd Cochrane, which runs alongside his successful site at geeknewscentral.com.

I noticed a post by him citing a new type of comment spam that he and others had started to see happening on blogs that they own and manage. This new style is working to try and hide the links that spammers are attempting to push onto sites, mostly by linking them via a single character on the comment, so that it isn’t obvious when just browsing through the comment itself. Todd’s post also goes into some detail about how spammers try and gain a sense of trust before starting to put links into their posts. I’d recommend reading the article, it’s certainly interesting to hear his thoughts on the spam issue and new trends that he and others are seeing.

Bots are relative easy to beat but if spammers are using real people to leave relevant comments linking to their spam sites this will be a bigger challenge.

This quote was of interest to me because it goes a long way in summing up what bbProtection is and just why it works. When checking and filtering spam you need to actually check what is being submitted rather than who is submitting it. Of course, certain checks on a particular spammers IP range or other details relating to the submission can prove useful when checking if a post is spam or not but if a system is checking the actual content of the post then spammers are going to find it increasingly difficult to get their posts and registrations through the system.

bbProtection is designed with the bulletin board in mind but we would of course welcome anyone to use our open API to design a system that works for different blog packages as well. However, more about that in a later post .

For those of you on the social networking “scene”, this may be of interest to you. We’ve now got our very own bbProtection Facebook group . It’s an open door, so join and tell your friends who may be interested in the project to join as well.

Also, look out for some new blog posts coming over the next few weeks relating to the project as well as the spam problem in general .

The Story So Far…

In the first post in this series I started talking about how the Wordpress service Akismet compares to bbProtection. While the concept behind both services is very similar, the target audience and data structures are quite different. The first major difference that I called out for consideration was the fact that Akismet does not, to the best of my knowledge, have a way to process user registration records. Since for many years phpBB2 board owners were faced with bots that would register and never post this would be a problem.

bbProtection Does Posts Too

The bbProtection service is designed by bulletin board users for bulletin board users. The team understands how boards work, and have direct experience with running boards of their own. I personally have been waging the war against spammers on my boards for many years and was a part of the pilot program for the first release. Why am I making a big deal about this?

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I am writing this post in anticipation of the question: Why bbProtection? Why not simply write a MOD for phpBB (or insert-board-here) using the Akismet API instead? It’s a fair question, and one that I think should be reviewed. After all, if someone else has already done the hard work, why not reuse it?

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For those of you who aren’t aware, Londonvasion 2008 was phpBB’s first conference style event. Our very own Dave Rathbun presented about the spam problem facing board owners and his attempts to try and prevent it.

The presentation is well worth a watch and is also downloadable from the Londonvasion page, under the [08] phpBB Spam header.

Dave explains a little more about the content of the presentation over at his blog, so go and check it out .

Well, where to start… I’m Vic D’Elfant, in charge of the development of bbProtection for both the first beta and the new, upcoming version. Apart from my team position here at bbProtection, I’m also a member of the phpBB Development Team and run a software company in the Netherlands, Coronis.

It is very exciting to work on a project like bbProtection, for a number of reasons: its purpose (fighting spam!), its scale (huge!) and the possibility of this taking really off and becoming a very successful project. This has a very motiving effect and will certainly keep my team and myself going. I personally learned a lot during the early beta days of bbProtection, but this will be covered in a future blog post by either Mark or yours truly.

Spam: We’re still on the lookout for new developers. We can only do “so much”, and we would really welcome some enthusiastic (and not to be forgotten, knowledgeable) people to join the development team. As per our abuse of Uncle Sam on the bbprotection.net placeholder page: we need you to help us, which eventually helps… you. If you are interested, please email to the relaunch email address found on the placeholder page, or drop me a line at IRC; my username is Vic on irc.freenode.net.

Hello, I’m Mark and I am currently involved in re-starting the bbProtection project.

Many of you will know me by my username MarkTheDaemon both on phpBB.com and other related fora. I’ve been involved with phpBB since mid 2005 when I set up my first phpBB2 forum. In 2006 I joined the phpBB MOD Team and to date I am still on the phpBB team.

I was also involved in the first beta of bbProtection, mainly in a support and documentation role. This time around I am more involved with the PR side of the project, bringing delights such as this blog so you are able to read about and comment on our progress.

The main reason why I originally got involved with the project was to fight the spam problem that we had then, and even more so now. A service such as bbProtection can go a long way to stopping spam that continually angers board owners, due to the time it takes to filter out, edit and remove the offending posts and users.

My nick on IRC is also MarkTheDaemon and I look forward to talking with you about the bbProtection service .

I’m known either as drathbun (on phpBB.com and some boards) or Dave Rathbun (on other boards). I started my first phpBB board in 2002 soon after the initial release of the 2.x line. I think I got my first spammer a few months later. I have been writing MODs and testing strategies to combat spam ever since.

I joined the moderator team at phpBB.com about two and a half years ago. During my time on the team I have seen spammer attacks on the board as well as major improvements that phpBB3 has provided. But I don’t think that phpBB3 and its new features will be enough. I have seen some very creative spammer techniques that a service like bbProtection can help prevent. As such, I am quite excited to have been invited to join the team here.

In real life I work as a database consultant and have been working in that area for over 18 years. I don’t do DBA work anymore, but I do enjoy applying my skills at design and optimization to phpBB MODs. I am still running the first board I started which now has over 32K users and 440K posts… running a highly modified version of phpBB2 at this point and still going strong. I blog about phpBB (and other things occasionally) at the phpBBDoctor blog, and I have a few other phpBB-related sites that you can probably find with a little help from google. In my spare time I wonder what I would do if I had any spare time.

Most of you probably know me as Noxwizard.  I’m a member of the phpBB.com Support Team, and now a developer for bbProtection.  I joined the project soon after it launched, but only as a user.  Now I’m here to help in its revival.

Some background about myself.  I’m a student at Texas A&M University, and am working on my computer science degree.  When I’m not doing phpBB related stuff, I’m either coding something, or playing a game.

It’s time to find out who is actually turning this idea into a reality . Over the next series of blog posts various team members will be introducing themselves and letting you know a little bit about them and why they are involved in the project.

Remember that many of the people introduced will be located in our IRC channel, so feel free to pop in and chat to us about bbProtection .