Is Invision Power Board that good? I ask this because I might have to choose a paid forum system for another abandonware site. We get too much spam with phpBB and no matter what mods I install, the spammers always break through.

So is it worth it? Do you usually get spammed? Is it easy to create new templates for it, customize it, get new mods for it?

thanks in advance :ok:

I don't know about all the moderator/admin stuff, 'cause I'm not a moderator/admin, but there's not much spam, and when there is, the mods seem to have no trouble blamming it right off the map. People who come on and make an idiot out of themselves can be nuked into dust, and it seems there are rarely any bots. I used to use another forum that is now closed, for reasons of it being part of an illegal password cracking site, which used IPB and that, too was pretty damn cool. Plainly, to me, Invision seems really quite good, all in all. I've seen other forums that have been destroyed by spambots and the AB forums are never at risk there.

The biggest downside with Powervision (our version), from an Admin point of view, is that the banned IPs are not listed numerically. This is non-changeable, and makes it hard to locate IPs that would be better banned by use of a wildcard.

This forum just places the latest IP ban at the top, and so on. So you may have bots that all use the range 255.255.255.20*, but you won't spot it. So you'll end up banning 9 IPs, instead of just one. Which is really tiresome.

As for security, bots seem to be able to bypass the system, if they want to - but it is much less that what we had with phpBB. :ok:

You just need a good Mod crew, and a nice Dustbin to place all the bot spam, so that you can ban them. Don't just delete such a post, as then the bot will just post again later.

To be honest, there are a lot more mods available for anti-bot spam posting on phpBB than for Invision (mostly using captchas and similar human-poster auth types).

Invisionize and InvisionModding (two large IPB modding communities) were pretty devoid of answers beyond "Don't allow guest posting" when I was looking for help combatting our bot spam here and on AR. Of course, that's becoming more and more useless when you consider that spambots can actually register and validate for your forums nowadays, and it's getting worse.

There are many features, however, that make Invision highly recommendable over phpBB (the minimal-tweaking customization options, stability, security, and support are much better as expected for a commercial board) - but if spambots are your main consideration for switching, I wouldn't bother paying the money until Invision develops better support for those issues.

Of course, if you just want a smoother forum and someone to point the finger at and get angry with when technical issues happen, go for IPB :P

Although a smoother forum would be great, my main concern is really at avoiding spam.

In my experience, banning IPs proved to be close to completely ineffective against bots, so I gave that up entirely and went for mods. Mods did help a lot, but didn't quite end the problem.

Well, you still could have less of a problem with IPB, because the main reason phpBB is so highly targeted by bots is because it's also more widely used (it's the same phenomenon you see with viruses).

IPB is less widely used (being commercial), so it is targeted by less bot scripters, but as more people throw in the towel and pay for the IPB services, that will change, though there's not as much support for combatting it (at the moment). That will also probably change when it becomes more and more of a problem, and IPB mods tend not to be quite as sketchy (unstable) as some of the ones you'll find for phpBB.

Well, even if there's little work being done in the way of preventing spam on IPB forums, is there any work at all? Is there any kind of countermeasure, mods that can be tried?

Being not perfect as any other system, it'd be a relief to see something being done about the issue.

well most spam seems at the moment under control here. But it involved some additional coding. so it is possible to prevent spam, but it takes an active approach from your own side.
This board is quite easy to moderate. you can easely perform grouped operations. (A real bless when cleaning up gamediscussions)

Although I can code in php, I'd rather not modify a ready-to-use forum code myself as my level isn't that much advanced, I certainly wouldn't know where to start. All mods I install in phpBB I do with step-by-step tutorials... one's got to be honest about one's talents and the lack of :)

I hope I'm not being considered some funny smartass by coming here to ask opinion about the system you use so I can use that in my own site -- I've always considered Abandonia my brothers in arms, considered this a model community and Kosta a model webmaster so that's why I came here and not anywhere else... Please do make clear if you're uncomfortable with my questioning.

Pfft...

You're way too humble, fellow monkey. ;)
Anyone who has hatched is a welcome member here :ok: