does not go to the ftp you go to admincp/Plugins & Products/Manage Products/Add/Import Product

I'm so glad I asked you before I did something foolish.

One more question, and I apologize in advance for how amateur it is -- after I download the zip file from your post, how can I save it to my desktop? I've been trying (I've extracted the files to save to my desktop, I've copied and pasted the XML file), but nothing seems to work. The computer says that the file is saved there, but I don't see it. Then when I browse to get the file (while in admincp), it does not show the file...

You should be able to extract them to a location on you local computer, then find that location in the file chooser that pops up when you press the Browse button next to "upload the XML file from your computer" on the Import Product page.

Just in case, there are a couple of things that could be confusing on that page. One is that you are either getting the xml file from your local compter (by pressing the browse button and finding it), or you are getting it from your server by entering the path. Since you are trying to find it on your local computer, you don't have to change what's in the "import the XML file from your server" text field.

Also, from that page you are either importing or creating a new product, and since you are importing, you will want to ignore everything in the "Add New Product" section.

if you are still having a problem with this pm me will install it for you

Great! I've got it added.

I've looked all around but I don't see where I can edit the options for Spambot, per the image file.

ForceHSS, thanks for the offer; I think I'm good. Hope you're doing great, brotha!

To the very top left of the admin cp click Settings, then options. In the selection box scroll all the way down and select Spambot Stopper Options.

Awesome; thanks!

Now I wonder if there's a way to see which of the users on my site are actually spammers. I have a feeling it is almost all of them.

that would be the ones posting spam or sometimes spam bots don't post they just have links in there sig

These people have posted nothing. But they put in the biography field, for example, "man" and then choose gender "female". And they have very similar names. And their email can be related to buying shoes or something. But they haven't posted anything....

I can install something for you that will help you with that won't take long pm me your site url and a temp admin login you can add me to Skype if you want (will give you that in a pm) and will share screens so you can see what I am doing but for now delete that person he is a bot

I've installed this mod and that went well, but Im not sure I did it all correctly. On the plus side instead of 14,000 new users with names like LKCJOERIMDLK I have none (empty board for the moment), but I want to get this sorted out before I develop the site further.

I can see 16 users (bots) all trying to hit and they are being show an error page according to the user list, but nothing is being appended to a thread I set up for this purpose. I don't care to get emails each time, but having it hit the thread would be handy.

Should the thread id be just the number or the full string?

It should be just the number. You also need to set the option above it, "Post Notification to Thread" to Yes. Someone else was having an issue where Glow Host spam-o-matic was blocking the post. They released a new version a little while ago that was supposed to have a fix for the problem, but last I heard, the person having the problem said it still wasn't working. I haven't had a chance to try it myself.

Anyway, if you have Glow Host spam-o-matic installed, you could try disabling that temporarily to see if you start getting posts from this mod, then at least we'll know that's what the problem is.

ETA: oh, also you need to enter (in the last option) the userid (number) of a user and that will be used as the author of the posts.

Thanks for the response.

Yep, it is enabled for sending messages to a thread.
the thread is set using just the number.
I have it set to use userid 1 (which is a valid account) and I have tried both the number and the full string
13932
13932-Thread-for-block-posts

I only have the Q&A enabled, maybe that's the thing blocking them? Its possible I guess, I can turn that off for a while.

I will let it cook another day, see if anything shows up.

Hmm...well, if you have people being blocked based on time, then you should be seeing notices. Have you tried registering a test account yourself to make sure it's working? You can also turn off "Force Wait for Minimum Time", and set the min time higher, then register in less than the min time and see what happens (although on a live site you could potentially block real users while you've got it configured for testing).

well, its doing something :)... I turned it off for 5 minutes, removed it, installed it, configured it, and in those 5 minutes I had new users and garbage showing up. So its working, just not the posting to the thread part.

Ok the piece that disables the 'proceed' buton on the registration form works, if i set it to 300 seconds its unusable until the time expires, but if i leave the button alone the registration is still processed whether the time expired or not. Im running 4.2.1 of vb, is this too new? Until I get the bot thing sorted out Im not opening up to the world so there are no users yet, I can blow it all away and start from scratch. Also, could this be due to some web hosting limitation of the php config? Im not sure how this works, but I would expect it is just comparing timestamps of when the form loads to when it is submitted, which shouldnt be reliant on any special php functions.

What do you mean by "leave the button alone"?


I haven't tried it on 4.2.1, but I'll do that this morning. Otherwise I don't think there's any php version issues. What version of php are you running? I haven't tried it with 5.4 since I believe vb4 only supports 5.3 or lower (I'm not sure about those numbers).

By leave button alone I mean turn off the option to disable the button until the timer expires. Im not manually editing any code, all change are made via the plugin management form.

PHP on my host is 5.2.17

Oh, OK. And php5.2 should be OK. Let me try it on 4.2.1 and see if it works and we'll figure out where to go from there.

OK, I find that it works with a new 4.2.1 installation. Did you enter anything for "Maximum Elapsed Time" or "Limit Notifications by Registration Time"? And what did you select for "Action". When you say it went ahead with the registration, did it actually create the user? If you chose "Stealth" for the action it will show you the message as if the user had been created even though it wasn't.

Edit: I'm sending you a PM...

Action is set to 'Show no permissions'
Minimum elapsed time is currently set to 30, have set it to 300 for testing myself.
Max Elapsed Time is set to 0
Limit Notifications is blank

Yes it created the user account and sent me the email verification email.

My assumption is that when this works the results of completing the registration form too quickly should be I get an error on the screen that displays the no permissions error, or if I select the return to reg page action it would display a message I enter in the box for them to see.

Those settings sound OK, and you're right, you should see the error if you turn off the button and register in less than 300 seconds.

Since I can do it without annoying too many people, I will remove everything, purge the database, and start from scratch. I only tried installing one other mod which was the spam hammer and it had issues with the php ini settings, which I have no control over. Didnt like the url get options or something. Anyway, will start fresh and see what that gets me.

That sounds like a good idea - I suppose it's possible that it didn't get fully uninstalled and is interfering somehow.

ETA: Thanks for letting me know (via PM) that after your reinstall this mod is now working for you.

Yep, since last night 104 have been blocked, and 0 new registrations have been successful. Thanks for the help and this great little antibot mod.

If you're getting that many blocked...

Look up each IP to find its IP range, then check to see if that range is a hosting company (ie, server farm where no legit users should be coming from). Block the range at the firewall level or using DENY in .htaccess. 2-3 weeks of doing this an the number of blocks you should be seeing will be a handful per day. The bonus is it will block a lot of other bad crawlers, decrease bandwidth the server users and result in faster site response time.

Thank you for a much needed addition to the arsenal or tools to combat those unwanted bots. I am also pleased as to how simple it is to use. Job well done!

Thanks, I'm glad you're finding it useful.

When I go to add this via products vBulletin is asking me to choose from a drop down list what hook to choose. Can I ignore that and just add the product?

I installed Spam-O-Matic the other day, which has been very successful, and when adding that program it didn't ask which hook to choose, so am confused now as I don't know which one to choose for SpamBot Stopper if any.

Any advice gratefully received.

vBulletin v4.1.3

Hi, what you want to do is go to Plugins & Products > Manage Products, then click the "Add/Import Product" link under the list of products. On the next page use the "Browse" button to find the product xml file on your computer (where you extracted it from the zip file) and then click Import. You don't need to worry about any other fields on that page.

You're trying to add it as a plug-in. Follow the instructions above to add it as a product.

Tested with 4.2.1 and it works great! Installed and nominated!

Thanks everyone, you're right I wasn't adding it properly.

have done so now. Thank you again for your help, much appreciated.

Do we have to uninstall or disable spambot stopper and spam-o-matic when we upgrade to the latest version of vBulletin. I need to update to 4.2

Installed this the other day.. Overnight it blocked 17 spam bot registrations where almost all of them had registration speeds of 1 or 2 seconds. Amazing product! Thank you!

UPDATE
In the last full day, it's blocked 300 registrations and they keep coming

I have had this installed for quite some time and it works very well, especially when combined with another anti-spam method. I recently set up a forum (www.clintoncounty.us) with no spambot protection on a spare domain name and forward all failed registrations to it. Interesting results. Feel free to forward your bounces there if you wish or take a look at the stat here: http://clintoncounty.us/index.php?action=stats

Thanks for the mod kh99!

Background:

I had an issue a couple days ago where someone registered on our forum without completing the custom (mandatory) fields we added to the registration screen.

After some research, I think they were able to do this through ForumRunner. (I since reconfigured forumrunner NOT to allow direct registrations, but to refer them back to the forum's login page)

Issue:

I noticed this in my ERROR log, at the same minute of the registration. Just passing it along in case something needs to be tweaked to allow for Forumrunner, is being exploited in some way, etc


[02-Aug-2013 15:42:10] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function kh99_sbs_process() in /home/??blankedout??/public_html/forumrunner/include/login.php(386) : eval()'d code on line 8

Harmless error?

Actually, I would say that it's likely from the above error that this mod doesn't work with Forumrunner. I might be able to look in to it, but I don't really have any way to test it right now.

Well for now i disabled Forumrunner's ability to process new registrations, which should fix the issue your mod has at the same time.

I just wanted to make sure it wasnt a security issue or exploit.

The user was able to register without answering the usual questions, which may be an issue with forumrunner itself.

Thanks for taking a look at it and confirming that it's nothing I have to worry about.

Have a great day!'
Rhody

Ok total noobie question

Have Spam o matic installed and was directed here also to install this but in what folder do I load the xml into:o

Thanks