Spotted a bot trying to sign up a couple of times now. It's not getting through but the message in the log is

Not sure if that's a bug due to the "+" in the email address or not. But thought I'd flag it up for you anyway.

Thanks again for your work with this. It's saving me so much time.

Sy

For August 2008, Out of the 3580 registrations on my site for the 31 day period

~4%/150 were caught by SFS Email check
~17%/640 were caught by SFS UserID check
~36%/1300 were caught by SFS IP check
~41%/1490 valid registrations

1) Spammers caught by Email check are back in my normal range (not sure why it spiked to 10% last month)
2) Valid registration sticking at 41% for two months in a row now. Would like to see it higher, but much better than the 20-25% I was seeing For the first half of the year.

Ive had a look at the results that the remote site gives when using a plus addressed email. It response with "invalid email address" and as the result isnt in the XML-ish that its expected, the mod assumes that it got an error, which it did in a way. Ive reported it to the remote site for investigation as email addresses can have (RFC says) a-z 0-9 % - + _ .

I wonder if its a method identified by spammers or just luck, either way, if I dont get a response from the remote site about this, Ill add code to handle "remotely reported invalid email addresses" properly.

1490 valid registrations, Im lucky if I get that in hits per month :)

Skippy, did you notice the PM to the 0.7 beta site?

hi,

You can add in your description that it works on vb 3.7.3 just fine.It just catched two spammers trying to register

Awesome. Thanks for the quick reply.

Sy

Where can i see this?

Alfa1 i think skippy drew up those numbers from logs as there isnt a reporting tool in 0.61

Ah. I see. Thanks.

I seriously have no idea what I'd do without this mod! Thank you so much again for releasing it. We block approximately 15-25 spammers from signing up daily with it.

was working for me in 3.7.3 but started getting out of memory errors taking the whole board down, any ideas?

My PHP memory limit is 64MB

if you have a busy board (eg lots of people that are trying to register) it might cause things like this no idea what you can do about that except increasing the limit

the mod itself shouldnt be using that much memory. How many people are you seeing each day? That are trying to register? What PHP version are you running and on what OS/version?

Web Server Apache v2.2.9
PHP 5.2.6
PHP Memory Limit 64.00 MB
MySQL Version 5.0.45

100 users average at any one time

When I turn the plug-in off, the server memory load drops 30%

I am getting a lot of spam blocks, maybe that's it.

could someone tell me where i can find the function to report Spammers to the SFS Database? i think this two images i uploaded with this mod are for this function? right?

yeah good question i've looked for it myself turned on the usergroup permissions but can't find it ... I just added my own form to the admincp that adds the spammers to SFS database throug cURL or a socket connection if cURL is not availible

As mentioned in the thread before, that functionality was in the XML postbit but not actually included in the code, I kind of jumped the gun a bit sorry. I was hoping that an API was forthcoming from sfs.com but it hasnt been. The site admin of sfs has gone awol for a while as hes busy so Ill see if I can add the API code to the site. In the meantime, Ive got code there to add it and parse back the HTML to see if it was successful or not.

0.7 will include the ability to submit data to the website.

To acorndomains - the plugin should only really load when the page is doing a registration. Ill revisit the 0.6 code and look to see if its recompiling the code when it shouldnt need to - if it is then Ill try to modify the plugin to avoid loading the function code when its not required. Are you using any php accelerators at all?

Any ETA on next version ? This mod is a life and time saver for me. So far today it's stopped over 30 spam signups.

0.7 is almost done but is missing a lot of the GUI changes, the complete stats engine and has no bug/error handling at the moment. Ive adding those on a weekly basis when I get time from work, which isnt that often these days.

From above, is this file the installation.txt file or am I missing something?

one or the other depending on the version

First I'd like to thank you for taking the time to do this while you've obviously been busy at home.

I installed this mod easily this morning. Here is an excerpt from the log.
I have email and username set to enabled, but left ip disabled in the admincp vsStopForumSpam settings.

Since horoscopey is the spam lists, can anyone tell me what I might be doing wrong?

if you see "[REMOTEERR]" the stopforumspam service is down (or something has gone wrong while checking) in this case you need to set the option to block registeration on remote connection errors.

Hello.

First off, the idea of this mod is absolutely amazing. Great work.

I'm having some issues running it on version 3.7.3 Patch Level 1.

The install went smooth as butter...hooks were placed...and etc. etc.

When I went to try and 'sign up' as a new user using one of the names off that site...I got the following:

I am just starting out in VB...so kind of not sure what to do now. Can someone please help me? Thank you...I greatly appreciate it. I'll remove the product in the mean time.

your functions_vbsfs.php is missing you need to upload this file from the zip to your vBulletin /includes directory and this error will be gone

heh, thanks for

a. The feedback
b. Delphi for the helping hand. This is what happens when you take your kids out to the beach :) - you miss these postings

When installing vBulletin mods, there is usually an "upload" folder. There are the files that you have to upload to the (usually) root of your forum (dont upload the upload folder itself, just its contents).

While lots of modders do try to keep PHP contained within the XML product plugin, its not always possible to do so, hence the extra files.

Well done. The last day or so I have been hit really hard by forum spammer, posting some pretty explicit sexual content. I been looking at this mod the last few days, and decided to give it a try, as I GOT to do something about this damn spam! It's been a few hours now, and it has blocked & logged over 10 registrations. By looking at the log, these its apparent that these are spammers, and not legit users (e.g username of FeMaleAnimeP0Rn, etc).

Thanks a lot for this mod!

Must be a sensitive liberal!
LOL

nevermind ... found my answer

you have to love liberals, makes the world a funnier place :)

unicorn - Im glad

Madmunki - thanks :) Its always good to hear positive feedback, unlike liberals

Installed. Thank you

Step 6 in instructions. I only see Front end FAQ/Help and Front End Redirect messages. I dont see front end error messages there.
Am I missing something?

Thank you! My board was being hit hard by spammers today and this is stopping them. Prevented 6 from registering since I've installed it. :)

it rocks! Been working for me too!

I have another question. How come some say allowed user to register but I can find no trace of that user?

great just installed a few minutes ago. had about 50 registrations today all from russia. already this script stoped 41 all with email from mail.ru or gmail.com

thank you for this mod.

September board statistics are in:

9580 Total Registration attempts

18%/1700 were SFS blocked Emails
24%/2340 were SFS blocked UserName
31%/3000 were SFS blocked IPs
26%/2540 were valid registrations

Sadly valid registrations dropped significantly from last month. I had kind of hoped the spammers had given up and moved on.

IP continues to be the largest blocked reason followed by email addy and then username.

From what I understand the script works by checking against the SFS database for the details you have defined (username, email, IP, all three or selection of all). If there is no trace on SFS for those details then it allows the registration to proceed to the next stage, the actual vB registration itself.

If the user is showing in your logs as being allowed to register but then there is no userid link (basically the username isn't underlined) then the user didn't complete the registration process. If that was a spammer then you've nothing to worry about as they never actually registered and all you'd need to do, if you are certain that it is a spammer that's not on SFS, is add the details from the log to the database.

Hope that make some sort of sense lol.

Sy

unicorn, sym0n said exactly the issue. Ill check out the phrase location but if you search for "spam" in phrases, youll find it

great mod sir. so far so good.. only let one register so far... well i think it might be one. lmao.

Thanks

awesome product :D

stopped over 2500 spammers since i added it in august :D

Loving this plugin. Well done!

Am i right in the following:

- The images that are uploaded are for future versions, and there is no way to use version 0.61 to report spam?
- If i see a lot of the same user in the log a few seconds after each other (where they have been Allowed registration) then this is because they are more than likely typing an incorrect captch etc?

Cant wait for the next version.
Thanks