wow, I forgot all about the bots not getting past the recaptcha stuff. Thanks for the info. I really like this mod. Good job and thank you for sharing.

Great mod, thank you - this will really help reduce spam.

I have 1 problem with it at the moment. When trying to ban a spammer, I get a 404 because (for security reasons) I changed the name of both modcp and admincp folders but your mod does not recognise this. As this is such a common situation, you really need to add those variables to the options page.

Sure! glad you like it. Don't forget to give the mod a rating and vote it for MOTM :)

I will put it on the list for possible enhancements if this is something that a lot of other people want. Though I think that if you ask around, the moving of those directories doesn't really do that much good and is more of a hassle than it is worth when dealing with administrative tasks such as mods and upgrades.

Ok, update ...

Still getting members placed in moderation and can't find a pattern as one had over 500 posts and the other just 2 posts. One thing in common was that they posted one (1) link in their post.

Settings in Spam-O-Matic as follows:

Auto-Moderation: URL Count = 0 (academic since according to previous instructions, the "Minimum Post Count" at 0 should turn OFF this function anyway)

Auto-Moderation: Minimum Post Count = 0

Akismet as handled by Spam-O-Matic was disabled ...

Vbulletin Akisment was left ON ....

So, before we un-install Spam-O-Matic and go back to vBStopForum mod which was working fine (even with vBulletin's Akismet running), we're going to turn vBulletin Akismet handling OFF completely and turn Spam-O-Matic Akismet handling ON, although checking every post of every user group is a waste of time most of the time (really needs that "above x posts not checked") function.

We've left the moderation settings at "0" and "0" ... hopefully disabled. ;)

Anyway, let's see what happens with this set-up, which is now mutually exclusive to the two Akismet handlers.

Thanks .. :)

Regards,
Badger

I also had the issue with legit members getting their posts put into moderation. We have had zero spammers make it to posting in 2 years with about 4400 members registered and a couple hundred thousand posts. Our big thing is catching them when they register and booting them before they do harm. That is why this mod rocks, it does a lot of the leg work for us.

We have a forum that is specific to a certain activity, so we added some mandatory fields in the registration that would be well known by people that would join up, but spammers just end up typing "test", "asdfg" or "Russia" or whatever. Combined with manually approving new registrations, this dropped our spammers to zero.

We disabled the checking of the posts in the forum because it is not really needed right now.

On a side note, we did find that a few years ago we had some spammers sign up and just start sending spam via private messages. We simply made it so new members with less than x posts cannot pm. once they hit the magic number the pms are turned on. When that first started, we found that we caught every spammer with the standard akismet anti-spam that came with vbulletin, and deleted them before they could do harm. This mod catches the spammers before we even have to deal with them. nice.

This is a nice mod.

I'm not talking about moving directories, I'm talking about the common practice of renaming them. This is supported as standard by vB. There is a setting in config.php that allows you to do this easily witout any upgrade hassle etc. It's a standard thing and this mod either needs to get the setting from the vB config file or if that's not possible, allow the admin to configure it on the options page. Any security conscious forum admin will do that as standard.

Extract from config.php:

Sorry, I was thinking of the Linux commandline when I said "Move" which is the Windows equivalent of "Rename." I usually work in Linux so I got your idea and was talking using Linux speak, sorry for confusing you.

As I said we have it on the list, based on if many others need this we will consider it. AFAIK this "renaming" is not very popular, but we will see.

OK. Can you give me a workaround in the meantime?

I found 2 instances of "modcp" in functions_vbghsfs.php on lines 290 and 534 and changed them to my own modcp name and although I no longer get a 404, neither the remove or ban actions will work. I get an uninformative message and when I click OK, nothing happens.

Attachment 120598

Unfortunately I can't give you any workarounds at this time as we are busy working on other more pressing areas in the current version like improving the logs and improving the Akismet functionality.

Once we are done in those areas we can probably spend some time looking at your request, but these were not part our original plans so it will take some research for me to be able to give you a workaround., well, one that works properly anyways.

If I find a workaround, I will probably just include it in a future release instead of in a random post in this thread which will be unlikely to be read or found.

Ok, another update ...

Still getting members placed in moderation and can't find a pattern as one had over 644 posts and the other just 8 posts. The 644 post member placed a post with one (1) link in their post while the 8 post member just mad a regular post with nothing obvious that would trigger it being placed in moderation. :confused:

Settings in Spam-O-Matic as follows:

Auto-Moderation: URL Count = 0 (academic since according to previous instructions, the "Minimum Post Count" at 0 should turn OFF this function anyway)

Auto-Moderation: Minimum Post Count = 0

Akismet as handled by Spam-O-Matic is ENABLED with ID.

Vbulletin Akisment handling was OFF ...

Not sure what to do next, but as much as we think that this mod has nice potential and its author is making efforts to sort it out, we're going to have to un-install Spam-O-Matic and go back to vBStopForum mod which was working fine, even with vBulletin's Akismet running concurrently.

Perhaps we'll try it later on when the "kinks" have been worked out ...

Thanks for everyone's efforts ... :)

Regards,
Badger