I really wish that there was a free version of v-bulletin. Like, a lite version or something.

Anybody got an old licence that they no longer want? :P

Does it have to be vBulletin?
phpBB is free

thats what i'm using at the moment, but it gets attacked by spam a lot more than vbulletin software does

Fair enough.
I don't think you'll have much luck finding someone thats giving away £90's worth of software licence, but, you don't get if you don't ask

Quote from Krammeh :

thats what i'm using at the moment, but it gets attacked by spam a lot more than vbulletin software does

get a captcha mod and don't allow guests to post, helped a lot at our private forum.

Krammeh, did you not see my suggestion on your BBS about having new users confirm their email address before being allowed to post? I can't remember having to confirm my email address when signing up.
It might stop some of the spam, and the spammers that use a real email address.... simple, sign them up to pron.

else { http://php.resourceindex.com }

I wish people would put more thought into their thread titles.

Try SMF, it looks somewhat similar from the outside, but I don't know inside.

http://www.simplemachines.org

And it's free.

I use a free BBS from ProBoards. It's fast, stable and in three and a half years not one single spammer has gotten in. Ok so you don't run it from your own web server and if you want attachments and stuff you got to pay something, but if you can live without this, then I recommend www.proboards.com since it's so easy and stable.

My board here: http://score.proboards19.com first post dates back to December 21 - 2003. Before that I used EZ Board (these days it's called Yuku) but it was so spam and popup infested that it wasn't worth while keeping it. ProBoards only have a Google ad at the top that blends in really well. No popups, no hassle.

Quote from X-Ter :

I use a free BBS from ProBoards. It's fast, stable and in three and a half years not one single spammer has gotten in. Ok so you don't run it from your own web server and if you want attachments and stuff you got to pay something, but if you can live without this, then I recommend www.proboards.com since it's so easy and stable.

My board here: http://score.proboards19.com first post dates back to December 21 - 2003. Before that I used EZ Board (these days it's called Yuku) but it was so spam and popup infested that it wasn't worth while keeping it. ProBoards only have a Google ad at the top that blends in really well. No popups, no hassle.

Meh, it's got advertising and you don't have full control over the files and you have to pay for many features. No free setup forum is better than the one being run from your own site.

Quote from Krammeh :

thats what i'm using at the moment, but it gets attacked by spam a lot more than vbulletin software does

Modify it then. A friend's phpBB was being spammed regularly. Half a dozen lines of code added to the registration process and bingo! It stopped overnight

Add something like a simple maths question or other trivial, but simple question to the registration process (not an image with a code) and it should help.



Regards,

Ian

The most creative anti-Spam I saw, was 4 pictures of various animals and it said "Pick the <insert animal here> to continue the registration" and if you got it wrong, it locked you out for 24 hours by IP.

Quote from Lible :

Try SMF, it looks somewhat similar from the outside, but I don't know inside.

http://www.simplemachines.org

And it's free.

SMF is based on (and is inferior to and less flexible than) the free software YaBB2.

Quote from Ian.H :

Modify it then. A friend's phpBB was being spammed regularly. Half a dozen lines of code added to the registration process and bingo! It stopped overnight

Add something like a simple maths question or other trivial, but simple question to the registration process (not an image with a code) and it should help.

Regards,

Ian

Just put a little combo-box question:

Are you a bot?
- Yes, I'm a bot
- No, I'm human

yabb is a great alternative ... actually it does a few things far better than vb

Quote from Ian.H :

Add something like a simple maths question or other trivial, but simple question to the registration process (not an image with a code) and it should help.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/a_new_captcha_approach.png