What are the potential security risks or vulnerabilities when automatically generating forum posts in phpBB?

One potential security risk when automatically generating forum posts in phpBB is the possibility of injecting malicious code or spam content into the posts. To mitigate this risk, it is important to sanitize user input before inserting it into the database. This can be done by using functions like htmlspecialchars() or mysqli_real_escape_string() to prevent SQL injection attacks.

// Sanitize user input before inserting into the database
$post_content = htmlspecialchars($_POST['post_content']);
$post_content = mysqli_real_escape_string($db, $post_content);

// Insert sanitized post content into the database
$sql = "INSERT INTO forum_posts (content) VALUES ('$post_content')";
mysqli_query($db, $sql);