How to prevent bots from abusing your PHPBB3 search feature

Very often search bots abuse forums' search features and cause excessive CPU load. Such overloads may violate the AUP / TOS of hosting providers.

In order to prevent such problems in PHPBB3 it is recommended to allow the search function only for registered users. Here is how this can be done:

Go to your forum's parent directory and open the file search.php

Find the line "// Check search load limit" and right after it add:

if ($user->data['user_id'] == ANONYMOUS)
{
$template->assign_var('S_NO_SEARCH', true);
trigger_error('NO_SEARCH');
}

Save the file and your PHPBB3 will be protected from anonymous searches including bots.

You need help with an application? hostlantern is specialized in hosting and supporting more than 200 scripts. Sign up for our web hosting services and let us help you with your application, 24/7!

  • 0 Users Found This Useful
Was this answer helpful?

Related Articles

How to configure phpBB Mass Email to comply with the SiteGround e-mail terms of use?

You have to configure your phpBB script to send less than 400 messages per hour and every message...

How to disable PhpBB3 search functionality for guest users?

Often the phpBB3 search functionality is abused by different spam bots. They perform searches as...

I am getting ‘General Error SQL ERROR You have an error in your SQL syntax’ in my phpBB forum.

Usually, this issue is caused by a missing Anonymous user for your forum. Therefore when an...

How to enable RSS in phpBB?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication - a web feed format for publishing frequent updates of...

How to protect phpBB2 from spam?

In order to protect your phpBB 2 forum from unwanted messages, you can use the Akismet mod for...