Check IP at registration, ban from ...

[Thomas P]

Hello,

we have some chinese spammers lately, is it possible to not allow people witch IPs located in China to register.

They may mail us, if valid inquiries exist, but we are a german based forum. None of our members comes from china...

Thanks,
-Tom

[GameWizard]

There are many options to prevent bots/spammers from registering. Such as blocking IP ranges or using some of the following hacks:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=151824
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=124828

[Thomas P]

Thanks, but they are human beings... so none of the hacks will prevent them from registering.

Yes, ban them via IP, but - do you have the IP Ranges from China? All...?

[GameWizard]

Unfortunately no, you will need to ban them as they come, then check their IPs and see if there's any pattern to them. Should be easy to determine if theyre coming from a specific range of IPs in which case you can simply ban it and prevent future attacks. Although make sure you don't accidently ban legitimate users in the process! So be careful.

[Thomas P]

Thanks.

I'll see if I can get GeoIP working...

[Wired1]

vbStopForumSpam (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=176481)

It's beta, but works great. Already blocked 30 attempts today. It uses this:

http://www.stopforumspam.com
Its a RBL type system for forum admins, listing known spam IP / email / usernames.

[Thomas P]

Yeah, that looks good - thanks

[mangel.ajo]

I'm having the same problems with chinese spammers too... I think I will try vbStopForumSpam :)

Did you try it? :)

[Thomas P]

Not yet, but I'm verifying all spammers against stopforumspam.com - really many are in their database.

We are going to install the hack this week.