Looks good - but now I feel like I'm a competitor. :)



Thanks. This is probably a good time to say, I give credit to users Max Taxable as well as calorie, because calorie wrote a mod many years ago that uses this idea, and Max Taxable has been recommending calorie's mod for a long time. I was actually skeptical because I always found that Q&A worked fine, but I can't argue with all the people who have found this method useful. Anyway, my only contribution is in making sure that an updated version of this idea remains available on vbulletin.org.

As for the ip banning, I was considering that, but the problem I have is that I feel if ips are going to be banned automatically, you also need a way to monitor the process and search and remove ips, as well as a way for someone to contact you if they get banned by mistake, and then it turns in to a major thing. What I was thinking of doing in the next release (some time this week) is to use the login "strikes" system so that at least it wouldn't be possible for anyone to try too often. I'm also going to try to include a summary email option instead of one per registration.

No I also use yours. Bots use vbulletin defined named for custom fields e.g. field1, field2, field3 etc .. mine uses an admin defined name for custom field. If they ever find out then admin simply changes the name and jQuery stops process if field is empty.

Or set a second count value option before they to add to ban IP list would be good.

If some human can sign up in 2 seconds then they super human or a bot.
Most of the ones today were 2-5 seconds that it caught for me and I just manually added their IP to the ban list. But it still a lot of work.

Good Stuff and thanks again for your time and effort!

Cheers

Sean.

Installed for testing with thanks on vBulletin 4.1.3pl5... :up:

Regards,
Doug

They already came to my site to investigate what is blocking them, but then your mod kicks in. So once I get an email from you, I simply change the field name in my mod vboptions. My mod also indicates that 99% of the bots are from China. So I blocked China an end of the story

Easier said than done. Every day there's a different IP range, even if you're using 0/24 range blocking.

easy for me. I get country from IP. A special function gets it, not from range

I've been using FASSIM and it works pretty good.

You're both missing the point. I also use a country IP blocker on 2 forums as well as a custom IP locator on those plus 2 others. My point was that new IP ranges are added almost daily to highly populated countries like China and India and it requires monthly or weekly updates of IP ranges just to keep up - even that might not work on a busy established forum which is targeted by spammers.

Battling spam is not a "set it and forget it" issue. It requires continuing vigilance and varying the tools over time as spammers adapt their own weapons to current defenses.

I agree with that. When they catch up with my mod, Kevin's mod kicks in and I simply adjust my mod with a new vbotions name for that specific required custom field. As far as IP is concerned I get the country code from a 2 lines function. If that were to return nothing then it still stops it. But so far it has always returned a country code

bottom line I am down from 150 spams daily to 0 -2 and I am happy with that. Since I stopped China, back to 0

If the majority of vb users were using good tools that would certainly discourage spammers