Identifying PHPBB Forum Spambots
You need to monitor your forums for spam and spambot activity. Forum Spambots are food for the algorithms and are classed as a deceitful way of trying to game the search results with copy, spun content and follow outbound links which could result in a filter or manual action from the Google WebSpam Team.
Spambot Registration and email Spambots
The UGG spambot registers users with different user names, emails and IP’s, even completing profiles, at times even including a profile pic, a link to a website and a description. The more advanced Spambots can even create signatures.In the beggining the spambot only posts one post per article.
This is to try to make it look as human as possible. In big forums, you’d possibly not realize its a spambot. You’d think its a human that submitted a single spam post. But in reality, the spambot has already registered new users, each user posting, but not posting excessively as to give reason to believe that the forum is under “spambot-attack”.
Always keep in mind that this specific spambot (UGG-Boots-Jersey-Captcha-Spambot) only spam’s websites and not email addresses.