The true cost of spam can be hard to quantify. There is the cost of the time spent cleaning up spam, which I recently wrote about on another blog. (In that post I determined that a few simple anti-spam measures had saved me $20,000 worth of time after just over a year.) Another cost of spam could be lost members or advertisers because of the inappropriate content that gets posted on your board. Still another cost of spam could be an entire board. How is this possible?
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.
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?
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?
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. 