Who might this New User be?
 

Hiyas,

When a new user registers your board, this hack analyzes his email, password, ip address and isp (ranged ip) against existing board members and produces a sorted list with probabilities about who this new user might be. (See screenshot below). This list will be emailed to you with new user notification mail. (The probabilities can be modified by you so it's you who decide how matched results are sorted and ranked, dont blame me!) ;)

Tested and will work better in relatively smaller boards (less than 3000 members). If you have a small board, this hack may help you a bit to track and pinpoint existing users if they re-register with different usernames. For large boards, IMO it's pointless to track new users anyway..

As far as I know it will work with ANY vbulletin version so feel free to try. Installation is very easy, actually 2 simple steps and will take you 2 minutes to apply..

If they change their both ip, isp, password and email, the hack cant get them, yeah I know! This is the best we can do with computer technologies. If you have higher expectations and demands, you may regard consulting a "Seer".. :p

If you liked this hack, I suggest checking Jawelin's nice Paranoid dupe user buster when moderating Hack too. They make a good couple and I use them both.

Click Install button, if you installed the hack, thank you!

Enjoy! \=^))

Logician

Screenshot:
(This is the part of email you receive when a new user registers)

Great hack, i will install this one later. Thanks.

Very nice idea and implementation.

Many thanks even for such undue greets.... :p
I'll use ASAP.

Just a question: I have enabled moderation, but not email notification to the admin. I would, if some percentage value is overcome, receive that email.
Which variable should I check ? Do you think it should possible ?

I mean, if my $newuseremail is usually empty, i could put at the end of your hack something like:
By now I use the counter of matches, but actually don't like it...
:)

Thanks again.
Bye

installed!!

awsome stuff! :)

note about installing on 2.0.3: i put the code on register.php just before this

@Jawelin: To add such a feature, first find the part in the hack code:
After that add:

Replace X with your probability you want to check.

Now if a user's possibility of being another user is more than X%, then hack will flag the variable $alert_tick and by checking it in register.php, you can make the script send you email notification.
Like in your code:

Hope that helps.. :)

@All: You may ignore this message if you dont want to have a feature like Jawelin asked.

Looks good, I just got what it does :D

This is fun idea!
Good for my paranoid lessons 12step program :D

I will try to install it in the upcomming weekend.

Excellent. Works perfectly on 2.2.5. :)

Good hack!
I will install later!

Thank you very much for this extension.
Till now, I never found users matching more than 50%, and think - for test purposes - i'll try to lower that value.
Thanks again.

Bye

Will this work on existing members who have registered or just new members?

checks just new members against existing members' data..

Yes, but it is a very effective troll detector. I have a couple who can't figure out how I get them banned or on moderation before they can even post. :)

I installed this, and it seems to have worked fine. My first new member to sign up after this is installed, emailed me their information, but for the probability part, all I got was:
WHO MIGHT THIS NEW USER BE?
----------------------------
# | PROBABILITY | USER..| ID.|....EMAIL........|.MATCHES..................
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------
[email] => indicates user has the same email with this new user
[password] => indicates user has the same password with this new user
[IP] => indicates user has the same IP address with this new user
[ISP] => indicates user is from the same ISP with this new user. That is, their IP range is same. Eg. 195.100.200.XXX etc..

Any idea what I may have forgotten?

nice hack

Good news: this means the new user might be nobody! :D

If his ip, email, password, isp does not match that of any existing user, this list will be blank. So everything is ok, this is no bug..

But if you want to second my word, go register yourself as a new user and use your admin password and check what hack will return to you.. ;)

Logician

Installed, works perfectly, very useful to me.

Good stuff. :bunny: :bunny: :bunny: :bunny: :banana:

hahaha... thanks... nice hack!

Is it possible to even have the ability to check existing members? I realize it would probably have to be a whole seperate hack, but would it be something that would be fairly easy for you guys to do?

By the way, I love this hack, I think it's one of the best on vb.org.

Mark they look same, their algorithm is similiar either but if you want to do a good job, you have to restructure the hack to code your request. Here is a technical info:

In "who might this user be" hack, the hack retrieves the IP address (email and password too) of the new user and searches BOTH the message database and userdatabase to match the IPs (and ISPs). You have only one IP to check against other users IPs, so handling it is easier.

However if you want to check an existing member's IP inside the database, things changes because he might be a dynamic IP owner and an active poster which means he may have tens of different IPs recorded in your database. If you want to do a good analyze as this hack does, you have to take all these IPs one by one and search them inside your database. This can be time consuming if he has too many IPs or if your database is big or your MYSQL server is slow. Moreover this means you have to code this hack quite differently than this hack. So it's not really possible to make a quick adoptation, in the coder view, you have to handle things differently by coding it from the scratch.

I may try working on it sometimes but sorry not soon..

Logician please contact me via private message.....

I am sending you a big big bar of swiss chocolate...

Hey I love Swiss chocolate (and Switzerland too)!.. Too bad I'm on a diet :glasses: You'd better eat it for me.. ;)

Glad you liked the hack..

great hack, thank you

*install*

Is there any way to include the referring site in the email?

if you use $referrername variable in the mail template you get, it should give you the refering username if any..

I like the idea of this and downloaded it to take a look at the files. It says in your README that it does fine with smallish communities.

What could I do for my large one?

Could I have new registrations check with the banned (or other user group I specify?.... I have an "almost banned" usergroup that has no privileges other than posting...)

Could this hack work if instead of it comparing to all the members (over 21,000 now) could it compare to the few in the banned group and in this special group I created and maybe the option to add additional names we are suspicous of and keeping an eye on?

thanks for your help on if this is tweakable. :-)

Kathy by default the hack is not suggested for large communities for 2 reasons:
1- In large communities with a lot of members hack will match many users with same IP or ISP or password so wouldnt give you a good idea as to whom the new user might be.
2- Hack does not only compare IPs in the user database but also in the post database to give more accurate results and if you have a large database (user or posts or both) it would take a very long time to match new registerar's IP in the database which will result in a slowdown in register process.

So it's not good for you as it is.

But I guess it can be tweaked so that it will only compare IPs of banned members and warn you if a "potential" banned member re-registers or even better put him in a special usergroup (like moderated) if the hack decides new user is likely a "banned member". :glasses:

i just installed the hack but i am having a little problem on my testboard (2.2.8).

everything works fine, but when i am finished with registering i get the following error: i looked up the line and there it says any ideas?

What's the line (around) 587 in register.php?

that's the line in register.php

ok please replace that line as:

and tell me if it fixes your problem..

thank you :) it works perfect now!

Looks a great hack, but I am getting the following message after I make the changes...

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_ELSE in /forums/register.php on line 534

533 }
534 else
535 // this user does not matched before, so let's create a new array for him

I'd be grateful for any help! Thanks!

Forgot to say, using 2.2.7.

Thanks!

A few hours ago I updated the hack code and it seems that I've missed a { char. I corrected it now.. Please redownload the hack instructions and apply again. (To not to receive the old cached instructions, please make sure you right click the txt file and choose "save")

Logician,

Many thanks, all is working perfectly now!!!

One of the top quality hacks that I have installed that is actually damn useful. Thanks.

I like the hack but my board gets lots of new members daily.

Any chance that the email is generated from a from where I put the user name and the hack will only work for that user?

Best regards

hi

Any update for lage communities?


regards

hello.

first off. i want to say that this is one of my favorite hacks. as far as administrative hacks, this is by far my favorite.

it worked like a champ on my old host, no complaints at all. but i have moed hosts, and then upgraded my board to 2.3.0, and now I can't get this hack to work the way I want it to.

first off, the email no longer sends me the password for each user. how do i correct that error?

second, the email has a blank line between each line, as if it were separated by a <br> thing or something. I double-checked the template, and it looks fine.

help!