defeating russian spammers...
 

i am at a point where i'm sick of deleting 4-5 phony registrations each day from russian spammers. none are getting through to posting on my forum since each new registration must be human approved, but the process is tedious and after a few months, i'm wondering if there isn't a better way.

since these registrations are being done by 'bots, they are keying off their understanding of the vBulletin scripts. in particular, they only need to know where to find "register.php" for a given site, and then they can bombard the site with phony registrations.

what i'm wondering is this... why does the registration script have to be named register.php? if every site customized the name of this script for themselves and made a minor modification to the appropriate vBulletin templates, then these 'bots would be defeated, would they not?

for example, the templates that link to "register.php" could be changed to link to "xdfageystrd.php" and the "register.php" script could be renamed as "xdfageystrd.php" and everything should still work for humans following the register links in the HTML, correct? the only difference is that when a 'bot tries to directly access www.site.com/forums/register.php (which is what i assume they are doing), it won't be able to find the register.php script, and that should stop the phony automated registrations cold... at least until the 'bots get smarter.

can anyone tell me if/where the problems are in this idea?

Good idea.

One thing you can do is require email activation upon registration before anything could be posted, or if it's bad enough require moderated registration where you have to activate thier account before they can post.

What I do is use no Spam which you can get off here. I made a few questions that have to be answered before you can join. That I think helps.

i do both. but it's still tedious to have to monitor registrations everyday and activate the real ones while deleting the bogus ones. i'd rather just defeat the 'bots directly.

John, it would be very easy for you to do this yourself.

• Re-name register.php to your desired file name.

• Search and replace vbulletin-style.xml for register.php to your new filename.

• Search and replace vbulletin-language.xml for the same file.

• Re-upluod style and language via ACP.

• Search and replace existing template customisations for the change incase you have custom edited a template which contains the filename, which would not be affected by the re-import of the style xml file.

Each time you upgrade you will need to perform the actions on the style and language files and re-name your register.php before uploading. It may not even need the change to the language file at any point; I don't know off hand if there are any references to register.php in there.

I have renamed quite a few of the vB file names, it seems to give me improved Google results too - maybe because it spies something a little different and not the out of box solution.

Although personally I would like to see it become a part of vB settings, where you can name each of the files individually and a variable would be used in every file name, template and phrase to identify each filename.