Thanks everyone for sharing that info.

Just installed for my site. Seems to work fine. Need more time to check it out.
Thanks,

Since i installed, no more bots. Very nice

Just installed this yesterday and already I notice that there are no obvious spammers trying to register - whereas before I was getting 30 - 40 per day.

It's early yet, but this mod seems to be working great.

Thanks a lot...:up:

Even on an extremely busy forum you shouldn't be getting dozens or hundreds per day, not if you properly manage your server. A big part of this is deny thing HTTP access from common server farm IP ranges. I have about major 300 server farms blocked from all over the world, and it knocks out 95% of the spammers.

Plus setup whitelist mod_rewrite rules in your .htaccess to give obvious non-browsers a 403 error code.

One of the forums I recently purchased didn't do any of this, and had a ton of daily spammer registrations. When I implemented the above it dropped to 1-2 per day. Over time as I've added more server farm IP ranges the number has dropped further.

Now, that being said, this is a great mod. I installed it and it caught an IP yesterday. I looked it up on projecthoneypot.org, sure enoug it was an active bad IP. I looked up the IP range, validated it was a server farm and added that range to my block list. This plug-in will help me find more server farms to block, especially the smaller farms, and that makes it very handy.

Also, I block all of China. In over 15 years of operating forums I don't believe I've seen a legitimate user China (just spammers, crawlers, scrapers, etc.).

Agreed. The bulk of spammers comes from China and Russia. Besides blocking them I also redirect them to China military. After being bombarded they will deal with their own

kh99,
Wanted to change the email subject line to add the ip addresses
so changed these two phrases:

$vbphrase[kh99_sbs_notifyeach]
Registration Rejected $regip

$vbphrase[kh99_sbs_notifyeach_accepted]
Registration Successful $regip

Do you see foresee any problems with this?

No, I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work.

Wow that was quick, thanks.

One problem I haven't been able to fix but involves Glowhost Spam-O-Matic
recently I needed to enable the option:
Auto-Moderation: Minimum Post Count = 6

but now everytime a notice is written to the Spambot Stopper thread
it is flagged for moderation

Have tried setting the Spambot Stopper id to 1
and also creating a new user with admin permissions

any ideas?

Hmm...could it be that the forum your thread is in is set to not count posts (in the forum manager, "Count Posts Made in this Forum Towards User Post Counts" set to No)? But that would only be the problem if the user you're posting as didn't have at least 6 posts in some other forum.

I'll take a look at it when I get a chance, there may be a setting when adding a post that will stop it from being moderated (or maybe I'll have to look at Spam-O-Matic to see what it's doing).

Thanks,

Count Posts Made in this Forum Towards User Post Counts was already set to yes

Switched it back to the admin user id=1 and verified spam-o-matic is set to ignore id=1
then created new thread id but still same problem with it being sent to moderation.

I was able to get it working by changing this setting for Spam-O-Matic: AutoModeration URL count
-changed it from the default of 0 to a 1 (or anything higher)

if above is set to 0 the Glowhost log says: "Post put under moderation based on Auto-Moderation URL count"

but can't explain why spam-o-matic is not ignoring this since the Spambot Stopper poster id=1 :confused:

since released.The mod blocked well over 3,000 unwanted users.:up:

It's always good to see something like this in the server error logs (from a known spammer IP)

...probably,+registration+failed+%28activation+cod e+was+sent+/+there+are+additional+protection+used+on+forum

:D

removed other spam bot products, using this one

will install and give some feedback

Thanks for the feedback everybody. Sorry the update's taking so long, but I am still working on it.


I'm surprised they'd put that much information in a url.

yea I think it came from the evil "Xrumer" prog

Hmm, I see. I'm not very familiar with those kinds of apps, I should probably do a little research.

kh99,

Is there a way to add the Q&A answer they may have submitted to the Registration Rejected Email?

There will be in the next version. Well, hmm...I need to look at it again before promising. It's easy to log the answer, but I can't remember if I figured out how to log the questions. I wanted that for myself because I like to keep an eye on it.

lol - yes showing the question along with the answer does make a little more sense
(I guess that's why you make the big bucks!)

PS I think they are slowly catching on to the timer thing though
have received a few of these Rejection notices
all from same IP all within 1 minute of the forum time

Form submission time less than 20 second(s) (1 seconds)
Form submission time less than 20 second(s) (17 seconds)
The registration time was greater than the minimum of 20 seconds (33)
The registration time was greater than the minimum of 20 seconds (50)

but ofc the ones that made it past ended up getting rejected by the Q&A or spam-o-matic
:)

Well, that sucks. To be honest I was always skeptical of this method because it's not difficult to get around, and we've been doing ok for a long time using just Q&A. The only reason I implemented this is because a lot of people seemed to like it before that other mod was deleted. Well, I think the new version will still be useful to log and notify, even if the time check becomes less effective.

I agree the logging and notification is great - so plz don't give up your mod yet
-only had 2 like above out of hundreds of rejections that didn't get past the timer

Thanks for your hard work!

ps - a small (probably enough for a slice of pizza - in the US vs. UK :) ) donation may be coming your way soon

Don't worry, I'm not giving up, although I'm not sure how long it will take since I'm kind of doing it in my "spare" time, along with a pile of other things. I was concerned that the retries that your log shows might be a new feature of spamming software, or an existing feature that no one's bothered to turn on for vbulletin. But I suppose it also could just be retrying on error, in which case it could be detected. I have a few ideas but I think I'll keep them to myself for now. :)

Also, thanks for the donation.

hi,

I am swapping the register template in a mod I am creating by creating a plugin at register_form_complete:why can't I get the timer to be active in the new template which is basically a copy of register template plus some additional stuff?

I'm not sure if you're talking about the part that stops the submit button from being pressed until the time expires, or just the time check in general. This mod adds the button javascript to $headinclude and adds the form hidden fields to $timezoneoptions, in a plugin that uses register_form_complete and an execution order of 5. So if your replacement uses those [S]and has an execution order > 5,[/S] (Edit: execution order shouldn't matter, template is rendered after that hook location) then you're OK. It could also be something else about your mod, but I wouldn't be able to know without seeing it.

thanks. I was talking about the submit button. If it's ok with you I could PM you a link and admin access. Increasing execution time did not help

Facebook register doesnt work with this plugin..
Any suggestions?

Well, all I can say is that I tested it with fb registartion and it seemed to work. I can look in to it again.

Yeah it worked(I thought it didnt because of the error message).. Registration was successful but shows errors:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in [path]/register.php(90) : eval()'d code on line 247
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in [path]/register.php(90) : eval()'d code on line 247

Thanks for posting that, I'm sure I can figure out what's causing that.

Edit: I found the problem - I'll release a fix soon, hopefully sometime today. FYI, it looks like it happens right before redirecting to the forum page, so all registration steps are completed, the only effect would be that the user sees an error instead of being redirected.

Installed this on my new site.

site has only been up for a week.
I set the time limit to 25 seconds

And it has already caught over 30 Spammers, not one has gotten through yet.

I love this Mod

Thank you very much

Some users take a loooooooong time to fill out registration:
The registration time was greater than the minimum of 22 seconds (169)

Is there a limit on the upper notification range before causing problems?

There should not be any upper limit that would cause a problem with any normal registration, unless you set the max time to something low. If someone started then got distracted for a while and went back to it, they might have to start over.

ETA: oh, you meant the upper value of the notification time range? No, I think you should be able to set that as high as you want.

Yes I had it set for 180 and didn't get notified of a few new registrations...so I've cranked it up to 600 now to match the post editing timeout.

Why don't you just set the max time to 0, that disables the max timeout all together.

apsrfvb4 was talking about the "Limit Notifications By Registration Time" setting. You can make it a range, and then it will notify for successful registrations if the top of the range is greater than the min time. But apsrfvb4 was wondering if there was a limit to how high you could set the upper value.

Sorry, I guess I misunderstand the question

Yeah, I misunderstood it too, when I answered the first time. That probably didn't help. :)

As you predicted setting the range 1-600 caused no trouble

Here's one that would have been missed before
- The registration time was greater than the minimum of 22 seconds (252)

Maybe it's my Q&A questions are too tough and causing a delay:
pick the animal that says moo? :)

(patiently waiting on your next release with more Q&A logging to find out)