In case someone doesn't know, Simple Machines Forum - SMF for short - is, as the official website says, a free, professional-grade package that will allow you to organize your own online community in a few minutes. on this engine, you can see it here. I myself put my forum on it (by the way, go to FreeForum.biz).

It doesn't matter if a lot or a little spam appears on your forum. The important thing is that you are wasting your precious time on moderation. Setting up a plugin that will do all the work for you takes a few minutes, and it will save you a total of days and months, which will add up to the minutes you would spend erasing messages and deleting users.

I will notice that I tried to fight spammers on my own - I blocked access by IP and even by subnets. It really worked, eliminated a lot of garbage, but, nevertheless, once every one or two days someone made their way. And quite a lot of time was spent on replenishing the database of banned IPs. I thought there must be a more convenient way, and it really was found!

1. Installing and configuring Stop Spammer

In two weeks of operation, this plugin blocked 2202 fake users. Each of them would leave at least one message. Spammers are not going to slow down and every day I would spend time cleaning up my forum.

Instead, every few days I go to the user management page and see something like this:

I turn to the section "Awaiting approval" (these are the found spammers who are deprived of the opportunity to leave messages before their approval accounts administrator). I tick the box "Select all" and delete them with one click:

That's all, all spam accounts are sent into oblivion. Back to our list of users:

It can be seen that the list has noticeably thinned, but who are the rest? We select all and send them with one button for verification:

One "red" appeared, we immediately delete it. If you have free time, you can do others. If there is no time, then do nothing with new users - most of them will "blush" during subsequent checks. If you have time, you can go to their profiles and see - if there is a link in the signature - immediately banned, these are fake accounts of spammers who will never leave a single useful message.

I told you how to use this magic plugin, now I will tell you how to install it.

Download two files: language_full.zip (this is the language pack for translating the plugin) and StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip (the number may be different, since the versions are updated). Unpack the contents of the StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip archive into some folder. Unpack the language_full.zip archive into the same folder, agree to replace the files. Now zip our folder.

In the admin panel, proceed to installing packages. Opposite the "Download package" inscription there is a button for selecting a file on your computer. Select our new archive (where we replaced the language file), upload it to the forum and activate the package.

That's all done!

Additional configuration of the plugin takes place in the admin panel: go to

Users → Registration → Setting

You can leave the default values ​​there. There is also a field called "Your API Key". Without this key, you will not be able to report new spammers (but the plugin will work and filter known spammers). If you want to get your own API key, go to www.stopforumspam.com to register, and then enter the key here. If you have not received the key yet, leave the field blank. Then the default key will be used.

2. Installing and configuring Anti-Spam Links

The adherents of the SEO religion (you can see more about my attitude towards SEO-nists in another) have a firm conviction that by increasing the number of links to their site, they "promote" it (for some reason, the idea of ​​creating interesting and high-quality content for none of it never occurs to them). There would be a sucker, but there would be ways to get money out of him. So, some "citizens" provide services for "running" sites on forums. They create a large number of accounts on different forums and insert backlinks there in signatures and in other available fields. Despite the fact that even "seo-experimenters" have already empirically proven that there is zero sense from these links, some warn that for this you can get a ban from search engines Yandex, for example, simply ignores links on ALL forums and sites where anyone can post links. Google also has similar algorithms - ignoring links in comments, etc. But the law is not written for suckers ... Therefore, we, the owners of forums, have to reckon with the facts that "cool SEO-optimizers" order a "run" of their shitty things for a thousand rubles.

Plugin will filter out a lot Stop Spammer... But we can help him! You can knock out the interest of spammers to post links on your forum. This is what Anti-Spam Links is for. This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does so:

• those who, for example, have less than five messages, cannot leave links at all
• those who, for example, have less than 15 messages, cannot leave active links, http: // is removed from the links and in general these links become nubolinks (newbielink)
• those with, for example, less than 50 posts can leave active links, but all links receive the nofollow attribute.
• well, those with more than 50 posts can insert the most common active links that transfer the site's weight to the page they link to.

Believe me, would-be SEOs are very attentive to the form in which their link gets to the site. They will very quickly lose interest in your forum if they can't easily post their shit-links to their shit-sites there.

Yes, by the way, the above rules also work in such fields as signatures.

To install this plugin, go to its official page. Download the anti_spam_links_v1.0.1.zip archive (the number may be different). Again in the forum admin panel, go to the package installation (as you did with the previous package) and install it. There is no language file for this package, so you don't need to unpack the archive or do anything with it.

To configure the plugin, go to the section

Configuration → Configuring Mods ... → Configuring Mods

If you wish, put down how many messages the user should have to upgrade their capabilities.

Conclusion

These two plugins will make your life VERY easy for you, the forum owner, and will save you a lot of time. Nevertheless, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, it is necessary to “thin out” users and delete spam messages. So don't throw your web resources away!

The size of the web page and the speed of its loading have become relevant again. Content loading speed is becoming one of the ranking criteria for search results. Much has been written about GZip and Deflate compression, as well as about server caching. Let's talk about headings.

So, your ASP.NET application, among others, sends the following headers to the client (values ​​may vary):

• Server: Microsoft-IIS / 6.0
• X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
• X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
• (optional) X-AspNetMvc-Version: 1.0

By removing these headers, we will "lighten" the traffic by only some 100 bytes for each request, but, At first, it should be remembered that these 100 bytes, when multiplied by tens of thousands of requests to your server, will play a significant role. Secondly, the absence of headers will make life harder for attackers who will be deprived of information about your server version, ASP.NET version, and the platform in general.

Now to the point.

Remove the X-AspNet-Version header.

Everything is simple here. It is enough to add the line to web.config:

< httpRuntime enableVersionHeader ="false" />

Remove the X-AspNetMvc-Version header

If you are using ASP.NET MVC framework, add this code to the Application_Start handler in the Global.asax file:

MvcHandler.DisableMvcResponseHeader = true;

Removing the X-Powered-By header

Launch the IIS administration snap-in and go to the "service" tab in the website properties:

If you have IIS7, everything is similar:

Remove the Server header

Everything is more complicated here. This header is added by IIS itself, so you have to clean it up by hand, using a little hack, again, in Global.asax, in the Application_PreSendRequestHeaders handler:

// all ingenious is simple
HttpContext .Current.Response.Headers.Remove ("Server");

Unfortunately, this will only work with the Integrated Pipeline Mode enabled - read - "only in IIS7". For IIS6, you will have to use a free utility from Microsoft -

Everyone knows that I simply cannot live without Joomla, but, in my opinion, there is no good forum in components. That's why I work with forum engines. One of the new ones I've just started using is Starting a New SMF Category, hopefully with some helpful material. We start small, and as a beginner, very useful.

First steps in search engine Simple optimization Machines Forum: remove copyright and external links

I'll make a reservation right away that I'm only working with smf 2 and this article will refer specifically to this version of the free forum engine.

And so, regular readers know how much I do not like to put on "10" external links to the official sites of engines, including forum ones. That is why, first of all, we delete the copyright and as many as 4, attention 4 external links of the form " SMF 2.0.2 | Simple Machines | SMF © 2011 | XHTML"! To do this, connect to the site via FTP forum / Themes / name of your theme/ and edit the file index.template.php... Naturally, at the very bottom is the code (about 330 lines), which is displayed by external links that we do not like so much. Therefore, we delete: "

", theme_copyright (),"

" and "

", $ txt [" xhtml "],"

". Everything is so simple and easy. In the next publications wait for new materials on the promotion and optimization of forums on SMF /

Well, let's start giving small tips on optimization and promotion of sites (forums) on phpBB. In this case, we will do a little hack that will help get rid of the external link of the form " Powered by phpBB ©... ". In this publication we will consider 2 ways with which you can do this - a trick for phpBB 3.x.x.

Removing the external link Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group and Russian phpBB support

First way to remove xref labeled Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group... And so, the most easy way- remove using the admin panel. We go to the administrative panel, go to the "Styles" menu item, on the left we see the panel where the block in the menu is located, we are interested in the "Style Components" block, and in it "Templates". By standard, in the proposed window, we will see the following: prosilver and subsilver2, although there may be others if you installed them. In general, not the point. From the proposed set, select the default one. Click on the "edit" button next to the template. Next, a window appears with the offer "Select a template file". Next, select "Template file" - "overall_footer.html". Below the HTML editor appears. We find the following code: " Powered by phpBB 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group"and just delete it, although you can set your own link and caption."
(TRANSLATION_INFO) "(which is below, you can also delete it) - this code is responsible for localization, for example, an external link labeled" Russian phpBB support ".

Second way to remove external link labeled Powered by phpBB © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 phpBB Group... This method is similar, but we connect to the site using ftp pratacol. Go to the following path styles / template_name / template / overall_footer.html. And we edit the same code that we edited above. If you change the code, then do not forget to set the UTF encoding - so "krakozyably" (squares and other incomprehensible characters) may appear in place of the anchors.