This! Just looking at my stats lately, there are so many more spammers than legit users. Also if they have trouble they just use the Contact Us link, and I can sort out whatever issues.

In the last two days I've had avout 100 spammers register and this thing is suddenly not stopping them. I tried the above change to the url and it apparently did nothing because I got a boatload of them registering last night.

Help!!

Stop Forum Spam was down for a while, hence the registrations were getting through. Stop Forum Spam is now back online, so they should get blocked.

SFS is working on both links. I haven't had an issue with increase spammers and they're being rejected daily on my site.

Turn on reCAPTCHA or one of the many other CAPTCHA mods out there to stop them spamming your contact us.

During the StopForumSpan server downtime yesterday, this mod was denying all new registrations even though my setting for:

What should happen if the remote connection times out when querying the new registration? set to Allow Registration.

This is a sample of the log details:
"Spam-O-Matic Tagged email - XXXXX@XXXXX.com Unable to connect to StopForumSpam.com. This is probably due to some temporary problems on their website: Unable to check. User passed to vBulletin registration system per your settings at 'StopForumSpam: Query"

It said it passed the registration attempts on, but no registrations with this type of log details ever came through.

This amounted to quite a few registration attempts over multiple hours to be incorrectly denied by what appears to be an issue with the mod.

Can anyone else confirm this issue?

I've only had this mod installed for a couple days and this is really my first experience with it ...first impressions are not so good.

Try doing what it says on post 1999 see if that helps you

Great Addon!

Just installed.. Can i totally get rid of Captcha now ?

I will give that a shot, but without knowing exactly which urls in the file to change and which ones to leave alone I worry I might screw something up. Since the mod does seem to work correctly when their servers are up I'm not sure even changing the api address would do much to solve my original issue.

My concern still is that the issue I had really didn't revolve around whether the server could be contacted or not but rather what it did when it couldn't be contacted. When it couldn't be contacted it didn't do what it said it did nor what the settings chosen in the admincp were set up for it to do.

Is this product no longer supported by the original author? Seems like this mod has been abandoned by GlowHost.com, their last post was close to a year ago. Not really a product that many large vB forums could live without!

As it says in that post change all of them. If it does not work you can always install the unedited one again? But if you do use this new URL you need to register with them and get a new api

My installation is working fine, and I didn't make any modifications to the code. SFS has occasionally been unreachable in the last few weeks, but has always come back eventually. I don't see what benefit there is to changing the URLs from www. to api.

You should a least keep one first line of defense to weed out most of the less advanced spambots. If not a Captcha, then at least a challenge question.

From the forum posts at StopForumSpam.com and their twitter posts it sounds like the api address at api.stopforumspam.com will be the more robust one (providing mirrors, erc.) that will allow for a lot less downtime in case of issues. The current address does not have all these capabilities and supposedly will not be getting them (from what I can tell) but still may work for some time. Currently both are working, but it is something everyone using this mod should keep on top of.

http://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/v...ic.php?id=4653

https://twitter.com/StopForumSpam

Im getting this error while trying to upload the xml file durigng installation. Please help!

@stalkingdatoast
1) Did you upload all files before trying to import the XML file?

2) Open PHPMyAdmin and make sure the have the table vb_glowhostspamomatic_log If you do not then create the table and then try it again.

Here is the SQL for that table, you can add it manually from PHPMyAdmin

I am facing a problem when i install the mod...gives me database error.....

Database error in vBulletin 4.2.0:

Can somebody update me what could be the issue

Your MySQL Version : 5.5.23-55 doesn't recognize TYPE=MyISAM. There are 3 instances of it in the XML file. Open the XML and replace the 3 occurrences with ENGINE=MyISAM

That will fix the problem.

vB.org REALLY needs an option for a wiki post after the OP like other sites do.

Thanks for the detail. Sounds like this mod could use an update.

I'd like the option of using Spam-O-Matic on the thread level as well as the post level.

Really good catch, swapped and will keep an eye on that.

Can anyone confirm that this is actually a requirement i.e. that we have to change all mentions of stopforumspam.com in file functions_ghsom.php?

If that was an isolate incident with SFS going down a few days ago then ... they seem to have had another of those isolated incidents today!

I didn't do any of those changes and things are working fine for me, for now. It did set to block registrations if SFS is unavailable, however.

No, they are not necessary at all. The issues people were experiencing had nothing to do with the specific URL but with database outages and a surge in spam in all forms over the past few days.

Good mod, catches a lot but also misses a fair bit too.

This is honestly the greatest thing ever made.

Pardon my newbishness, but in the readme.txt is says to "Upload content of the upload folder into you forum root folder". Contained in the upload folder are the following folders:

admincp
includes

The root folder already contains a folder called includes, so I must assume that I copy the "contents of the folders" to the "designated folders" within the root folder. We don't have a folder in our root folder called admincp. We do have one called admincontrolpanel. Would that be where I copy the contents of admincp to?

You have not installed many plugins just take the files and upload them to the same name folders

I got this error message...

I tried adding the tables but not sure what im doing. can someone give me a guide on what to put in here as the Mysql updated.

vBulletin 4.2.0:

Invalid SQL:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `glowhostspamomatic_log`(
`date` DATETIME NOT NULL,
`ip` VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL,
`email` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
`username` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
`message` VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
`is_blocked` TINYINT NOT NULL DEFAULT "0",
`user_hash` VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
`user_id` INT NOT NULL
) TYPE=MyISAM;;

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'TYPE=MyISAM' at line 10
Error Number : 1064
Request Date : Sunday, September 16th 2012 @ 01:17:57 PM
Error Date : Sunday, September 16th 2012 @ 01:17:57 PM
Script : http://www.topic+++++.com/admincp/pl...=productimport
Referrer : http://www.topic+++++.com/admincp/pl...?do=productadd
IP Address : 108.203.176.222
Username : bradleyj
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.5.23-55

I wish there was a way to add this information in the primary post!! I won't explain in detail, but you are running MySQL 5.5 and TYPE=MyISAM is not recognized. Open the XML file with notepad++ and change the 3 occurrences of that to ENGINE=MyISAM and that will correct the problem. Don't block Username with the mod, and if you read the thread, you will see that these statements have been mentioned multiple times. :)

Feature request, or maybe someone can figure out how to do this. But I'd like better presentation of the data in the log.

I'd like to see a histogram graph of how many spammers were blocked per week, per day, per hour, etc. What caused them to be rejected. Country of origin. How many legit users made it through, etc.

That way I could get a sense of what antispam efforts are helping, etc.

Anyway to download the data as a CSV file, then I could just use Excell or Matlab or something.

You already have two such lists available to you. The first is in the Statistics and Logs in the AdminCP, the second is in the database under the table name glowhostspamomatic_log

Date, IP address, Username, e-mail address, and a reason is given. I think that those two lists work just fine for me.

Why is there a link under "whats going on?" that links to this vbulletin.org thread?
Can that be disabled? I already have the affiliate disabled and give thanks.

Can you show a link to this on your site and a screenshot to show what you see as I also have this installed and this is not the case with me or anyone else

attached the image.

when i click it, it takes me to this thread. Shouldn't clicking it show or hide the stats?

I see that its supposed to list who has been blocked ect ect, mine shows nothing at the moment because my forum has been turned off since i just upgraded to 4.2.0.

Turn it off in your SOM settings...

thanks. I overlooked it.

Hi Slugger,

You need to look for the option that reads "Statistics: Link to Spam-O-Matic? - Link "By Spam-O-Matic" in forum statistics to vBulletin.org so others can protect their forums with Spam-O-Matic." and set this to No or Yes.

Located: Settings > Options > "Glowhost - Spam-O-Matic"

.Me

Hello there, when I enable this: my forum throws up a 500 internal error when I try to make a new thread or reply to a post.
Any help would be appreciated! :)