[3.3.x] Support Forum • Captcha before even accessing the contents of the board?

Hello,

I am operating a phpBB powered forum for a project on Sourceforge. It seems that Sourceforge (and our forum) are currently the target of some kind of attack that scrapes the contents from the website. Possibly some bot that feeds into AI training or whatever. This leads to a lot of errors like

User xxxxxxxxxx already has more than 'max_user_connections' active connections [1203]

Sooo - is there any chance to somehow configure phpBB to require a user to solve a captcha before being able to use the Forums even as a guest? The idea is to keep the bots from eating up all the available database connections.

The special circumstances on SourceForege require that this would need to be some kind of internal solution: The forum cannot access the outside world, so it cannot load any images or captchas from external server.

The phpBB version on our server is 3.3.14.

Any ideas are welcome.

Thank you and best regards,

Jan

Statistics: Posted by marsupilami79 — Wed Mar 26, 2025 10:47 am

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