Sometimes spammers are so obvious it would be foolish to wait until they've posted before banning them.

Recently I've had a lot of people register from India, Pakistan and Eastern Europe (I never have any genuine users from those places), who fill in lots of details in their user profile, claiming they're in the UK. A Google search has revealed they've recently registered for hundreds of forums using the same information.
It's just a matter of time before they start spamming all those sites.

Wouldn't it be better to get them blacklisted before they start the spamming?


I've been reporting these people to the SFS database manually, it would be nice if I could do it from within my vBulletin control panel.

No - since this may lead to board admins listing user details for posts they just happen to disagree with or perhaps have some kind of grudge against a certain board member.

As the Internet mail filtering administrators have discovered over the years - defining and identifying SPAM is actually not that straightforward - what is SPAM to one person is legit advertising to another.
To keep things simple we just want to focus on Unsolicited Bulk Emails or Posts (UBE/UBP) - the same advert or advertiser submitting to a large number of multiple recipients. In the case of forums this will be mainly from Spambots and will reflect as multiple entries for the same username/email over a period of time.

For a collaborative Database like StopForumSpam to be meaningful they presumably thus only consider submissions with clear cut 'SPAM' evidence.

Its then up to a plugin like Spam-O-Matic to interpret and make a decision on rejecting a registration based on the information presented there.
But it would not surprise me if this plugin has to be fine tuned in the future with a scoring system perhaps similar to http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SpamAssassin (for SMTP/POP mail) in order to reduce the number of potential false-positives.

Under "StopForumSpam: Desired Action", what exactly does the option for "log and continue with registration" do? Does it just allow them to register as a normal member and post? Or does it put them in a banned/temp group? We *really* need an option to put them in a banned/temp group if it doesn't already because of the following:

I'm starting to get an increase in false positives from stopforumspam.com. Some of these users have used the 'contact us' to report such false positives. Some of them may be members that other forums have banned and reported for whatever reason even though they weren't actually spammers. However, because they are not registered in a banned/temp account, I cannot reply to them or activate their account. Sending them a personal email would be far too time consuming. Advice?

Thanks!

Board admins can do that anyway, the current system won't stop that from happening.


The Stop Forum Spam database doesn't require a url to prove that spam has been posted. It would be pointless if they did as it would be deleted anyway.

Hi glowhost:

Thank you for the spammer software, but do not stick your ads in my footer forum, because it is not very nice for not asking me first. I thought your soft is preventing spammer, but you are the first to spam me on my forum. I can give you a space when I am completely design my website. I have no issue with that. For now, please remove it.

I am very upset!

Thank you.

Victor

Here is the link:
http://kieumau.net/forum/forum.php

You can turn the link off from within the settings. Read the FAQ in post 2.

It does exactly what the description says:

"What should happen if the new registration is listed in the StopForumSpam database."

If a spammer is found, you have 2 options. Log and block them from registering, or log and allow them to register. if you allow them to register then the rest of your settings control what happens from there...

Yes, they would go to the "newbies" group (as you called it a "temp" group) if you have set the system up for newbies management.

I don't know why you cannot activate the,m...just go into their profile in admin cp and change their group to registered users. If they were not able to register at all, then look at you log and see why they could not register, then decide how to adjust your controls to whatever suits your needs.

with this on my 4.1.4 it wont allow any posts from the quick reply box this error pops up

with the product disabled it did the same, with the product un installed quick reply works

Many people are getting this.
Is the only solution right now to disable IP check?

I'm running 4.1.4. Installed this mod and love it so far. Was amazed at how fast the spammers glommed on after my upgrade from 3.8 to 4.1.4.

Everything seems to be working fine, except for my Logs on the backend under Statistics and Logs. I just get a white frame with nothing. I'm on Firefox on a Mac. Not sure if it's a browser issue or something with my config.

Thanks!