The whole bbProtection team wishes all visitors to this blog a very happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Hopefully the New Year will bring a new method of protecting your bulletin boards from spammers .

This entry has been cross-posted from my own personal blog. Those of you who are following the bbProtection project may also find this piece of news useful. I personally like the work that Dave is doing to ensure the continued success of phpBB2 and thus we will more than likely be releasing a bbProtection client for it when the beta period rolls around .

It’s been a grand old 8 years to the day since phpBB1 hit the software shelves of the Internet and started to gain the interest of users and developers alike. Since then we’ve had many changes; phpBB2 was launched, phpBB 2.2 became 3.0 “Olympus” before finally being sent out of the door last year.

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If you are wondering why the idea of bbProtection was conceived then this is the post for you. Dave and I have been running some honeypots to catch spammers, their trends and their general behaviour for a few months now and its time to give a general idea on how things are going and just why we are running them.

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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 .

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 .

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 .

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 .

Those around for our first beta back in 2006 may remember the #bbprot IRC channel located on the Freenode network (irc.freenode.net) as a place for discussion between users and the team.

We’ve re-launched the IRC channel and welcome any and all of you that might have some time to pop in and chat with us. We really do want your feedback, ideas, and concerns on how you think the service could be improved as we prepare for our official re-launch.

For those of you who don’t use IRC, Wikipedia has an excellent tutorial regarding IRC use specifically on the Freenode network. Our channel is an open door, so simply connect to irc.freenode.net with your favourite IRC client and type “/join #bbprot” to join the party.

There will be a number of team members in the channel so drop in and chat to us about your thoughts on how we can make the service the best it can be .

bbProtection is a new type of anti-spam service designed especially with bulletin board systems in mind. It works with the “a rising tide lifts all boats” motto; as users report the spammers the service becomes more effective.

In December 2006 we launched the service with an open beta, but unfortunately it was terminated due to a lack of manpower and resources available at that time. However, we are happy to report that we are currently in the planning stages of relaunching the bbProtection service.

Our core concepts have not changed from the first beta period; we want to make an anti-spam service that is highly effective and allows users to concentrate on running their boards and not dealing with spam. We are taking the ideas and concepts that we learnt from our first beta and using them to build a better and more powerful service.

We hope that this blog will become the mouthpiece from which various team members speak about the road to our launch. We’ll be posting items that are still a working progress and welcome your feedback to create the best service for tackling the issues of spam that we have today.