Installed this last night.
Checked the log this morning and 31 spammers had been blocked. I am so very impressed with this mod.

Thank you Pedigree, excellent work!

Nominated for MOTM!

I've had this mod for a while now (almost a year), but over the last few days I've had quite a few emails from real people who have been unable to register because the plugin has blocked them, this is happening on all my forums.

I'm temporarily removing it...

It appears that the www.StopSpamLinks.com is dead... :(

Thats cause it's http://www.stopforumspam.com/ :o

Have an interesting issue. We have this installed on two separate forums, all seems to work well a far as programs operation but on one install "Prune vbStopForumSpam Logs" was installed under the log section and on the other forum, it was not installed. The installations were done by two separate people, could it be that something was missed in the uploads on the one missing the prune section?

BTW, have had this mod installed on one forum for about 6-7 weeks and the log is up to 3300+ the only spammers that get through are the ones that have fresh clean emails and IP's, but that's not many.

REALLY NICE! Just installed to my vBulletin 3.8.5 and looks like a real winner. However...

I was thinking that leaving the User name check enabled would be a problem as I suspected that common user names would get flagged. For instance, if someone tries to use "Fred" they should get flagged according to http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?username=Fred. I tried testing this by registering a new user with the name Fred and it was allowed even though I have User name checking enabled and the above URL suggests that it should have been blocked. So maybe I'm not understanding how this works...

We have been being attacked for the last month and now they have begun to try and hack into our board since they haven't been able to get through our registration blocks to prevent spammers and trolls. I am running vBulletin 3.8.6 Patch Level 1 and I have spoken to our host and they have suggested I contact vbulletin which I'm trying to do but I also thought I should let you all know what's going on too as if they are able to hack me, they can then hack anyone with this mod. Here is all the info I have on it which I gave to my host


I had them go ahead and do that. But it happened again today:

Please let me know if perhaps you guys can help me and if my board is safe...

Just this morning I discovered that I had yet another database error like the above one and when I checked the "member" who had just registered seems to be legit according to everything I can find out about them, so now I am really really confused! I know for a fact that the above two times were spammers/potential hackers but this time this person seems to be a perfectly legit registration and I doubt if they'd know how to do this... I'll share a copy of the error but I'm just very confused and don't understand any of this as this one looks more like the vbstopforumspam program itself might be responsible for these errors....

Database error in vBulletin 3.8.6:

Invalid SQL:
INSERT HIGH_PRIORITY IGNORE INTO vbstopforumspam_remotecache (date, data, spambot, field) VALUES (now(), 'mr_nazarene', '0', 'username');;

MySQL Error : MySQL server has gone away
Error Number : 2006
Request Date : Friday, July 30th 2010 @ 09:32:00 PM
Error Date : Friday, July 30th 2010 @ 09:32:54 PM
Script : http://www.fresh-hope.com/forums/reg...p?do=addmember
Referrer : http://www.fresh-hope.com/forums/reg...hp?do=register
IP Address : 64.134.158.177
Username : mr_nazarene
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version :

Please help me to determine if my board is safe and what is causing this database error.

Have you looked in the logs that vbstopforumspam keeps (bottom of your admincp in statistics and logs) to see if there are others that aren't causing this error?

Are you getting the 'mysql server has gone away' errors for other pages on your site also?

If it let the last one - mr_nazarine - register, try PMing him to see if he's real..

Yes I have looked through the logs. Nothing seems to cause this error. The first two errors were made by a person who's registration was denied (a lot of times lol) and he was obviously trying to bypass it. When I would look to see what he was doing on the board after his registration was denied it would show him "modifying or editing his profile". It would be at that time that I would get those first two error messages I posted.

As for this last error message, the username is shown twice in a row in the log:
but only shows up as once in the members list and the new registrations list. I checked them out very thoroughly and can't find anything to indicate that they are trolls or spammers or anything other then a regular person who wants to join us... in fact they appear to be a pastor.

The only other "oddity" that was somewhat like this that I've seen happened yesterday. Again someone registered and seemed "normal". (they have since posted and are fine) This is how their registration shows up in the logs:



What is weird is that the only thing that showed up in my member list or new registrations was the last one; none of the other three did...

It has let through only two that I determined were trolls and banned, but those two were only listed once when on the logs such as:

Yet when I looked in new registrations that name isn't there; when I do a search they don't exist. I assumed for lack of a better explanation that when vbStopForumSpam approved them that my other program Auto-Moderate Evading Banned Members caught them and disallowed them... but I have no way of knowing as there are no logs for that program...at least none that I can find... Thank you for your help!