Just a quick question, you jokingly said 1.2.4 was made especially for me, but is that version features (the auto blocking instead of moderation option) continue you with all future releases, or do I have to beg for a special version of each release you make? ;)

Thank you once again :) Will make an article about your hosting on my forum at some point.

Actually, I wasn't joking. You made a good suggestion, so I added it for you, me and everyone else. It is part of the core now so it will always be part of the Spam-O-Matic system.

PS

I appreciate the forum post. :)

Re-installed for testing ob v1.24 ... :)

Have temporarily disabled v.61 vbStopForumSpam mod and vBulletin's v4.04 built-in Akismet spam checking system...

Set threshold of post checking to 1, which hopefully will stop erroneous moderation of registered member's posts greater than 1, which was a problem under v1.12 of this mode...

Thanks for your efforts ... :)

Will post results ...

Regards,
Badger

Edit: same problem with v1.24 as with v1.12 and RSS posts. All are being moderated for an RSS user name poster that has far more than one post, therefore should not be moderated. Have now disabled "Auto Moderation" function of mod to see if that fixes RSS poster problem.

I am testing this out on 3.8.6 patch level 1. No issues installing, love the feature in the profile for submitting and banning. Will update if any conflicts arise.

Any reason why you don't add a feature to whitelist IP's?

Please mark it as installed. :)

Well, the main reason is I don't see a good reason for it. Can you tell me what you are trying to accomplish and why, and why you cannot do it with the current options? If it sounds good I can surely consider it.

Oops, thought I had.

*Installed* and an immediate drop of spam registrations followed. :D

That is good news :)

Hey we got nominated for Mod of the Month!

Please vote for us if you like this mod. It will encourage release of version 2.0 :)

Vote by clicking 'Nominate for MOTM' link in the release notes at the top right of this thread - you can nominate as many as you like during the month.

Done! ;) Great job!

Would there be any plans to also incorporate:
botscout

It seems that they already have vbulletin code ... it would be cool if this could be integrated into this plugin
http://www.botscout.com/

Thanks, just installed this on my new board. Will see how it goes. :)

Seems like when I submit user info it's not getting to the stopforumspan site. I had some one register using an IP that I had submitted when they had registered earlier in the day.

This is exactly what i was looking for, over the recent months i have been hammered by severe spam concerning pornography. It was so bad i have had to manually moderate new users and their initial posts. I am so thankful that something to combat this has come into play.

Thanks a million :up:

I was considering it actually, just depends on if users want it or not. I didn't see any great differences in the 2 systems.

Do you have your API key and have it configured in Spam-O-Matic yet?

You are welcome :) Please vote for us for Mod of the Month if you like it.

Yes, and it was working then all of a sudden doesn't seem to be now.

OK, I will check up on it. After your post I read that they recently updated their site and some things broke.

Maybe that is one of the things :) Thanks for the report.

I was wondering if maybe that was the issue because I noticed that their lay out had changed. Thanks. Great hack when the site itself isn't glitching.

Just wanted to say thanks for a great mod. I wrote something like this for another CMS and was pleased to see someone has already done it for vb. These tools make all the difference to forum spam and make running a forum viable!

I tried to vote for MOTM but i get a permissions error when I try :(.
Edit: ah have to vote on front page poll - i get it!

Good work.

I think there's something wrong with either this mod, or StopForumSpam.Com ... :confused:

I'm not exactly sure what's wrong, but for over two years I've been reporting spammers there automatically from our site using the original vb StopForumSpam .61 add-on mod and the API key provided to me by that site.

I just tried to BAN a spammer using this latest revision of Spam-O-Matic and it now appears to no longer work automatically, yet I'm able to manually submit to "line by line" spammers (hand adding them) to the StopForumSpam site, which is really aggravating and not worth the effort.

Can anyone help or know what's going on?

Perhaps they are now only accepting automatic additions from their own add-on mod vbStopForumSpam and not this Spam-O-Matic one?

Thanks for any feedback ... :)

Regards,
Bagder

Its a problem with the StopForumSpam site. They recently updated things and submissions to their DB are behaving strangely.

They important parts of this mod work which is looking up known spammers and blocking them. Once they fix their site, submissions should work again. We will look for a workaround in the mean time for those of you that want to report spammers, but the current problems with the stopforumspam submission process should not discourage you from usage of this mod because the primary goal is to block spammers, reporting them is secondary.

The original mod also currently has similar issues so I guess they did not simply block this mod.

This is a good reason to add in botscout as another poster has mentioned so that an alternative service can be used if one or the other is down.

Adding botscout may delay release of the 2.0 series which is being cleaned up for release now.

That's probably a good idea in order to have a back up plan for auto adding of spammers.

The strength of this system (and mods that support it) is the team approach of all vBulletin sites using it and reporting spammers to a common database for the benefit of everyone. Having to manually hand add every spammer will discourage a lot of web masters from finding the time to do so and the content will be come stale and inevitably useless.

Thanks for your efforts ... :)

Regards,
Badger

Sure :)

I definitely understand the importance of the contributions part. Without it, these mods would not be very useful. :) But for now most of us probably do not have time for manual submissions and can get by using the older results until fixes have been made.

We will be looking at what changed on SFS today and start work on the Botscout stuff.

I installed the products, and get the following error after hitting the "post thread" button:

Any idea? The error disappears when I disable the addon.

Yes, I have an idea. Did you upload functions_vbghsfs.php into your /includes folder per the installation instructions found in the readme file?

The error you sent says the file does not exist.

Botscout isn't going to be a good alternative unfortunately. It only allows 20 queries per day.

and

1.2.5 has been updated which should work with the new SFS web site.

You are welcome, thanks for the thanks! :)

Actually you are supposed to vote in the top right of the first post where it says Mod of the Month. Next to the "Mark As Installed" do-hicky.

That part gives you an error? The poll thing is just for a guess of who will win I believe :)

Ah yes, this fixed my problem, thanks!

My mistake was putting the "upload" folder into my forum root, rather than opening the folder first.

That's a show stopper ... I don't think they'll last long as a site ... ;)

Upgraded to v1.25.. will advise ..

Regards,
Badger

Interesting ...

Referring to your comment to the other poster, I find no file in your download package called functions_vbghsfs.php?

In my v1.25 download package there is a file with a name that's close to it called functions_ghsom.php. (see pic)

Ironically, when I upload functions_ghsom.php to my /includes sub-directory, I can't find it after that in the /includes sub-directory, but there is one that appears called functions_vbghsfs.php... does my Unix platform do something to this filename?

Regards,
Badger

Update:

I'd recommend that before anyone installs v1.25 of this mod, they be prepared to step back to v1.24. Once 1.25 is installed, quickly check your "mark forums read" function.

As soon as we imported the v1.25 XML and began to use the forums, we noticed that the "Mark Forums Read" function was completely broken. When members would click on that vBulletin function, it would simply clear to a white screen" and say "done" in the browser.

Since the only thing we had done was upgrade from 1.24 to 1.25 of this mod, we immediately DISABLED this mod and the "mark read" vBulletin function started working fine again.

Regards,
Badger

Installed, will report any issues. Thanks :)

Mark forums read function is working fine here on 1.25.

Have installed 1.2.5 and I still have a problem with submitting the data using the AdminCP. When i select Remove User, Remove Posts, Submit to SFS I click the submit button and it reloads the user information again.

Anyone else?

BadgerDog

functions_vbghsfs.php is from easier versions of this mod.

functions_ghsom.php is the name of this file in 1.2.5+

Anyways, this information was for the other poster who didn't upload the file, so it should not affect you.

Understood ... so can I delete functions_vbghsfs.php from my server?

Follow up ... v1.25 is NOT sending information to ADD spammers to stopforumspam.com. I've tested it several times using the AdminCP function add-on panel you provide in the users screen and nothing ever arrives and is placed in their database.

I don't know if it works through the moderation "delete as spam" function as I haven't had a spammer get through to be able to post a message.

I am able to manually go to their site and add spammers to their database.

1.25 is working to analyze and stop spammers from registering ...

Regards,
Badger

Thank you to you both. Had the same issue this morning. I dunno how I overlooked the file install.

Thanks for the quick fix!

~Brian

I've decided to uninstall this mod. After looking at the logs for the past month, I have come to the following conclusions...

• My forum rejects 9 out of 10 registration requests from spammers.
• This mod is only responsible for ONE out of those 9 rejections.
• The amount of false-positives is not worth the hassle.
• Akismet has NEVER (and I mean NEVER) returned anything other than a false positive.

The other 8 of those 9 rejections were done using a custom profile field:

• Simple Question: Are you a spam bot?
• Default Value: Yes
• Field Required: No, but display at registration
• Regular Expression: [NOno]+

Its simple. When someone registers, right before the submit button is this question "Are you a spam bot?"; with the default being "Yes". Unless they change the answer to "no", they will be rejected. This simple thing is responsible for almost all of my spam rejections.

Any bots that do get through eventually get caught by this:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=248560

Well, 1 is better than none I would say.

Why not just turn off the Akismet option if it doesn't work for your purposes? Is that the only thing giving false positives?

The question thing you have does work good and is a great thing unless everyone uses the same questions on their forums. The spambots can easily be trained to answer that type of question. The mods I have seen with such systems all have the same questions which sort of defeats the purpose.