I wish I knew but yeah its not working, using default theme also.

see a few posts above, where Glowhost explains the "lack" of logs.

basically its spammers hit the vB registration first and usually fail there, so no longer making unnecessary queries to the list sites. Therefore no logs. Spammers have to get by the registration system first, then they're queried.
At least thats how I understood the description.

not sure about that, this is what it's showing for me, and i'm using "GlowHost_-_Spam-O-Matic_v2.0.2_VB4.zip"

Mark,

Turn off Human Verification, and the logging will actually come.

Glowhost explained whats going on in the new vers 2.0.2 in a few posts above this one. Recommend they update the file description and the readme since everyone using ver 1 was used to reading an azzton of logs.

This script works exactly as advertised.


Thank you glowhost for sharing this mod and providing updates/feedback to the community.


I did have one issue where someone, that I know, tried to register for the forums and their IP was tagged and rejected?

Spam-O-Matic Tagged ip - 192.251.125.85 - Spammer Found and rejected.

What database houses this ip? Is it SFS?

Hi everyone,

I've just installed this awesome looking mod but have run into an immediate problem. For some reason it breaks my thread reply counts and stops new threads showing up in the new posts feature. I didn't see any mention of this anywhere else, can anyone provide any insight into this?

Thanks!

Thanks again for the update. You're the man! I love your plugin because it saved me alot of hours my life time.. :D

Just a suggestion, I'm looking forward to have an option to exclude forum ID from akisment/auto moderation checking. The reason for I mention it here because I run a large forum where I have a section where people can advertise for their websites in it and akismet sends all those threads to moderation.. I will only protect other forums from posting links which is not possible. :-)

Thanks for listning to me. :p

Yes, that IP comes from SFS.

This mod doesn't affect post counts, so I am guessing there is a conflict with some other mod that you are using. Try disabling them all besides SOM and then enable them one by one until you find the one with the conflict.

I've added your request to the list for suggested enhancements for a future release.

You understood it perfectly :)

In your screen shot, are you referring to the log entry that says "Sent to vBulletin Registration System" or something else?

I am starting to wonder how reliable spam-o-matic really is...I wanted to check
out some member issues, so i signed up on my own forum as a new member.

Immediately, I was denied, and accused of being a spammer...
(yes, on my own damn forum)

I wonder how many legit members are being denied also? After all, if you
were denied on a forum, would you actually take the time to email admin?
or would you just be on your way to someplace else?

Before you go blaming this mod for that, you might want to check if you have another mod that might be messing with things also. Others have had no problem doing what you did, so it might be something else. I would eliminate that possibility before I accuse this mod.

You can check why your registration was denied.

One issue we are having with the board is that people come on and register a new account and then in their user profile they put spam links. They also post without a link ... then add a spam signature later. Both of those things are allowable even with this tool. Is there a way to easily mark new users as spammer from their user profile? Also putting users into moderation who add links to their signature and or anywhere in the profile

You can use the newbies manager to put them in a newbies group. That group you should make with less permissions, for example, turn off the ability for the newbies group to post signatures.

Sounds like an excuse...Does spam-o-matic deny registrations? If the spam mod
thinks I am a spammer then tell me why i would blame another mod for blocking
my signup to my own board?

Its like when someone hacked my completevb.com theme, all roads
are pointing to his theme URL, but rather then helping, his first advice
is to say its not his theme but another mod...all hacking url attempts
lead to his theme, so why would I think it would be another mod?

Same here, if this mod prevents registrations for whatever reason based on
stuff we do not really understand, then why would I assume that another
mod was the cause of my registration failure when it clearly stated that
I was denied because the forum thought I was a spammer...so why
would i think it was another mod then spam o matic? its not another mod,
spam-o-matic thought i was a spammer for a reason...and if it denied
me for that reason, then I can only suspect that it is not perfect and
may deny other members also...accept it, or not....

I really do not like the concept anyway that spam o matic shuts you down
without any real cause...a simple questions and answers will prevent
95%+ of most spam signups anyway....

If you are not giving information on why you were denied registration, then it will be hard to see what the problem is. You are not clearly stating your problem. Check your logs and see why you were rejected. Please do this first. Then you can expect people to try help you.

You do address one problem though: out of the box the messages to the user are pretty vague and can easily be interpreted as if the user is accused of being a spammer. I get lots of support tickets from aggravated people that have interpreted the message as such. In 99% of all cases their IP is blacklisted by SFS.

If users would instead get a message that their details are blacklisted by SFS, that thousands of websites use this third party service and that users should contact their ISP to resolve this, then users would not take this so personal. That would save a lot of support tickets as well.

My one forum apparently had allot of spam for a while, is there a way to run this against the existing members so that it deletes the members and posts that match spammers automatically?

The generic message is easy to change, as it is simply a phrase:

I have used the below, which is explanatory, and I think needed, so that an unintended victim understands why this occurred, and that it is being done in the best interest of the overall community. It may be a bit verbose, but when denying a registration, it is prudent to present the reasoning, for those that get caught up in this that are not spammers.

Also, make sure you set the StopForumSpam: Remote Expiry option to a reasonable time frame (e.g.: don't make it months).

Can you please tell me why the submit function in de admin cp profile editor has been removed?

P.s. Askimet and Stopforumspam API are filled in correctly
p.s.1 asked this question earlier but never received the answer

I echo this. That function was perfect to deal with new registrants who simply signed up (got through the mod) and were either sleepers, or homepage stuffers.

Do you have a version 2.0 for VB3?

Its been removed because there were too many conflicts and we wanted to get version 2 released. If there are enough requests for it we can look in to re-enabling it.

Version 2 will only work on vB 4 and up.

Ok I am conffused, I have the software installed, it shows that it has blocked many people, however the owner of this ip 216.80.120.75 just registered and it is a registered user. The spam forum shows the owner of the ip as a spammer, how did they get arround the software?

http://www.stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/216.80.120.75

Maybe they were not yet on the ban list when they registerred on your forum. The timestamp on their site says it was only added on 13-Feb-11 08:39 PM which was a few minutes ago. Or he wasn't there at all and you are the one that added him.

So in that case then it is up to me to manually ban him? I love the software! Is there a way to run the spam list from the stopforumspam site against my database to get rid of all teh spammers that got in prior to the software being installed?

sometimes you could be the first person to submit the spammer's info. Think of it as blocking it for everyone else down the road :)

When you have SOM setup correctly and choose the ban option you will ban him from not only your forums but you will add his details to the SFS database so that he can't spam on other people's boards.

Thanks :)

No, you cant run it on existing users it would be a problem for the SFS website if large forums suddenly started submitting thousands of member IPs, emails and usernames at the same time. You would need to have a cron setup to submit small numbers of IPs in batches to their database and that maight take years to complete on a large board.

On smaller boards its probably beyond the technical ability of many users to setup the cron so its a bit beyond the scope of this mod to try to do that. I think the support would be too intense for free product so its probably not going to be implemented. Not to mention if it was setup wrong your board would be banned by SFS so that would be a bad thing.

Ok I think I have it set up correctly, so let me rephrase the question. If I am the first one reporting a spammer, in my case it as reported but after he was registered on the forum. So in the rare occasion that I am the first reporting a spammer, do I have to delete the spammer manually? Or did I miss configure something? Currently the software has been rejecting allot of spammers, so not sure what I need to do differently.

One other question, I added another hack that simply will ask questions upon registration in addition to the re-capcha. So I decided to test it to make sure than people are able to register. I used the bogus user name and a common email. I forgot about this hack and sure enough it flagged me as a spammer. Will my ip now be listed on the database of spammers?

You will need to look carefully at your SOM settings in the "Easy Cleanup" section and tell it to do what you want it to do with your users (delete or ban) when you run the SOM wizard from the moderation tools menu.

Will you be listed as a spammer, no, not unless you were able to register on your own forum and then you ran SOM which submits your details. The same way you submitted the last guy to their database...

I have to disagree. S-O-M version 1.x was blocking and logging 100+ spammers a day on our forums. That turns out to have been quite unnecessary. I believe version 2 employs a far more logical and practical approach by running only after vbulletin's human verification procedures have been passed.

After 1 week of use, the number of spammers logged/blocked by S-O-M on our site is ZERO. Only approvals and auto-moderation (keywords) have been logged so far. The website owners at SFS must be breathing a great sigh of relief; their database isn't taking the unnecessary beating version 1 was giving it.

Not one spammer has slipped through our Q&A these last 7 days, quite obviously far from the myth you proclaim it. I have no doubt our ZERO figure won't last very long though, someone/something will get through soon, and for that I am most grateful to have S-O-M there as a second line of defence. To be sure, I ran a test registration using a known spam email address recorded at SFS, answered the Q&A, and S-O-M blocked and logged me.

Version 1 proved it clearly works. Now, I'm glad to say, it only works when it's really needed.

Many thanks GlowHost for an excellent mod made even better. :up:

+1 on this, I considered going back to the previous version as I used the AdminCP profile editor remove/report feature all the time to remove/report sleepers that made it through the security.

I like the new stats feature, but really miss the AdminCP remove/report tool.

In the mean time I created a Sleeper Spammer usergroup to hold all the ones that make it through. I will keep my fingers crossed that there will be an update with the AdminCP remove/report tool.

Submit from profile would be nice to have.

Post made by a cron but having the admin user specified as the poster is still being put into the moderation queue..

Yeah me too. This was a VERY useful feature and I didnt have problems with it. If this is not put back in I too will be reverting to the older version.

Just installed this on vB 4.1.2
I left the "Web Hosting" link to GhostHost.com at the footer.
Thank you very much for this mod... very much appreciated!! :)

What sort of a cron? Are you using vB's built-in RSS manager or something else?

You are welcome! Thank you too for the link :)

Hi, installed it on 4.1.2, and when someone (anyone) tries to post a reply, I get the following error:

Warning: require_once(includes/functions_ghsom.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in [path]/includes/functions_newpost.php(443) : eval()'d code on line 5

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'includes/functions_ghsom.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home4/hustlepa/public_html/pbriot/includes/functions_newpost.php(443) : eval()'d code on line 5



As soon as I disable this SOM plugin, it goes back to normal. :confused:

a big thanks for this as soon as i installed it bang it started working and got a spammer thank you works great

I tried turning on the "Give Thanks" in the Copyright section however nothing shows up except for a Webhosting link in the footer section.

I tried turning off the Affiliate System to see if that was the issue, but it had no effect.

If I have both the Give Thanks, and Affiliate system enabled there is an extra line break before the Webhosting link. If I disable the Affiliate system, but keep the give Thanks active the line break goes away?

Should the Give Thanks, and Affilaite system be generating different links?

Give Thanks or Affiliate system may not show up in the copyright section if you have other mods running that hide the copyright or have a vB license to remove the copyright. This is why there is a setting to put it in the footer links bar.

It is not recommended to run both Give Thanks and Affiliate System at the same time. But just so I can be clear, and can test, where does this line break occur, in the footer link bar or in the copyright section?

It should not make a line break in the footer links with a default install of vB, I have tested this and the only thing that happens is two links for Web Hosting appear. I have not tested the copyright section though.

Yes, they should generate a different a href if you have entered in your affiliate ID into the settings of SOM. If you enable the affiliate system and do not supply any affiliate URL then it will default to http://glowhost.com