Site Management Which free forum software is better against spam?

[Ja sa bong]

There are many free forum software which someone who's low on finances can use to start out their webmaster journey.

From my observation, it looks like many free forum software normally get far more amount of spammers signing up which makes me ask which one could be the best at keeping them out?

 

[Shortie]

When it comes to using free forum software, I do believe from experience that there are add-ons and such that you can use to help prevent spam, many of which I have seen in the past used by those who choose to use free forum software.

Another way to help prevent spam as well is to have user groups set up with timeouts between each new post and thread so that it is easier for staff members to catch those spamming in the act and get rid of them pretty quickly.

 

[Neo]

On the Xenforo Help site we just set up we are using SMF (you can't get any freer than it). We use the SFS mod and so far it's been doing a very decent job of catching the few who have tried to sign up on the site.
We only check against email and IP. Checking against name is a useless proposition in most cases as you can block a good user if they happen to be using a VPN/TOR and then a common name.

 

[Cory]

I'm gradually nearing 2000 members and I've only had to ban 4 spammers on my site overall, and I don't think any of them were spambots, but real people. So, I suppose there is some good protection against spambots in the registration system of Jcink.

 

[Ravenfreak]

SMF has some good plugins you can get to combat spam. I feel like sites like Proboards tend to get more spammers joining than other free forum hosts, so if you wanted to go down the free hosting route then I would pick Jcink since it's got better spam protection than other free forum hosts IMO.

 

[Nomad]

I have used SMF, phpBB and MyBB, and in my experience phpBB gets more spammers than any other open source forum software. I think SMF is better with spam control.

 

[Ja sa bong]

SMF has some good plugins you can get to combat spam. I feel like sites like Proboards tend to get more spammers joining than other free forum hosts, so if you wanted to go down the free hosting route then I would pick Jcink since it's got better spam protection than other free forum hosts IMO.

It looks like SMF is the best to go with it since I've seen so many recommend it based on their experience of using it. Spamming always leaves a forum in a mess especially if you don't have the staffs to clean it up as quickly as possible.

 

[Neo]

It looks like SMF is the best to go with it since I've seen so many recommend it based on their experience of using it. Spamming always leaves a forum in a mess especially if you don't have the staffs to clean it up as quickly as possible.

We didn't even look at myBB or phpBB because of how old they look. SMF is not a lot better, but it does have some features we liked for free scripts. Since the site is in an evaluation mode - meaning whether it lives depends on if it gains traction - we did not wan to get a new server to run software like Discourse or similar. It needed to be a PHP script to fit the environment it was being installed in and SMF was decided to be the best free choice.
As I have commented, if the site starts taking off, we may move it to something else and on another system.