Ill see how I can add these options. If they were good during registration as a sleeping spammer, we would have to test their details again. This could be done the first time that they post or send a PM. I dont think that would be too hard to add. Ill look up the hooks at add that to the list of things to do.

Contacts being Contact Us I guess? Using the above method, I could do that. You would need to change the blocking text from "If you think this block is in error, use Contact Us" to "hmm, no change Charlie" :)

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

1) These would be enabled / disabled by admin preference

2) The notion would be that it would only check posts/pms for users that belong to specified user groups. This supports the notion of using promotions on your site to identify trusted users (ie. registered users versus trusted registered users (after 6 days and 3 posts or whatever your flavor is)

3) Contact, yes Contact Us. The understanding being that if you enable this you have prevented users from contacting you if they are incorrectly banned. Mitigation could include javascript, image based or some other obfuscated version of your email in the failure message)

wow, Im flattered, thanks. That would be great even to be nominated for the vote.

2 - There is an option in 0.7 to put new users into a specific group. You could use that to apply filters against. Ill have to up the database cache time incase Russ at sfs.com gets hammered/DDoSed by large forums that leave users in a group like this. Maybe I could include a "cut off" period for users in this group, where it doesnt check them if registered over 30 days (or X) days ago.

What I could also do is add a cron job to pull the daily IP ban list and put that into the cache. They should catch a lot of spam without the necessary remote queries. Its a fine balance between protecting against spam and DDoSing the limited resources of a one-man free website :)

If Russ was to move the lot into DNS instead of XML/HTML, that would make things a lot easier as he would have DNS servers caching data :)

3 - I believe captcha can be enabled on the ContactUS page but as the loading would be much less on this page than people posting into forums, I dont think lookups would be a problem here.

Captchas can be enabled (as can custom questions on 3.7).. sadly It seems that I am dealing with human spammers (mix of china, india, russia and us based) <sigh>

well, Ill add a IP based lookup for the Contact US page, pulled initially from the dialy cron job that pulls the IP lists and failing that, from a live lookup.

Voted as one way of thanks!!

Yes, voted, too - before the 1st reminder post ;)

Im flattered, I really am.

Update on 0.7rc.

The core caching / whitelist / lookup rewrite is complete with the following requests included
- GeoIP country banning (goodbye China - nothing personal but you spam too much)
- Much better caching support
- Better remote lookup support
- Statistics logging
- Locally cached cron import of the stopforumspam IP database

The core has been rewritten to allow easy integration into the Contact Us form and into post thread / message or PM so that you can configure it to check if details appear on the database for X days after registrations. This will allow a system admin to set, for example, a threshold of 30 days. If posting a PM or message within the first 30 after registrations, it will check the database if they appear as a spammer and will block it, with an optional PM notification to a mod/admin group.

Also included in the starter of the UI support, is full 3.6 and 3.7 integration, giving details of whois information, links to google searches, etc etc.

With the statistics module (that Ive started), youll get full graphs on a yearly period (older than a year gets auto pruned), with a daily, monthly and yearly totals/averages of
- Cache hits vs misses
- Country ban breakdowns
- Successful vs Banned vs Expired* registrations

*Expired is where there is a hit on the spam database but its older than the threshold set in the forum.

Installed and testing ... :up:

Thanks .... :)

One thing that has me a little confused is the field for:

Is this something I need to use this mod effectively and if so, how do I obtain a key?

Appreciate your efforts in trying to help us block spammers...

Regards,
Badger