A trick to send spammers to hell (or anywhere you want!)
 

Hello to all,

I think that most of you, have the same problem with me. Huge amount of spam posts in my site. I have tried any possible way to fight spam, but except the post moderation (which is a time waster), nothing was working.

A few days ago, an idea came to my mind, a simple way to do it, which finally seems to work fine, as I've 0 (zero) spam since that day. Even if the idea is simple, it's needs some knowledge to follow it, so try it in your own risk.

What you've to do (follow the steps one by one):

1. Turn your site off
2. Rename the file register.php to anything you like. eg I've renamed it to microrgister.php
3. Do a Search and Replace for the string register.php (case sensitive) with the name of the new file (don't forget the .php extention), in the files:
   1. The file that you've just renamed (eg in my case microregister.php)
   2. functions_online.php at /includes
   3. md5_sums_vbulletin.php at /includes
   4. email.php at /admincp
   5. user.php at /admincp
4. Upload these files to your site
5. Login to your AdminCP
6. Goto Styles & Templates -> Search in Templates -> Find & Replace
7. Search for register.php ..... Replace with the new filename (don't forget the extention .php). Set "Test Replacement Only" to NO
8. Here you've to click many times "Continue", but actually the changes are in a few only templates (You'll see them marked in red).
9. Now goto Languages & Phrases -> Search in Phrases and search for register.php setting Case-sensitive to YES
10. As I remember it's about 6-8 phrases to change. 3 of them (email phrases) have more than one (4) replacements.
11. That's all:)

As a final step, if you want to have some fun, write a file register.php with a redirection to anywhere you like and then upload it to your site. A sample code for this file is:
I repeat, that, if you're not familiar with such change don't even think to try it. A disadvantage is that Jelsoft releases very often new versions, so (as I believe) you've to repeate it in the future.

Maria

That's a really good idea. Vbulletin should just put an option in admincp to change it to whatever you like! Would stop a lot of bots/spammers I would imagine.

I agree, that's great, thanks for the tip. Should spamming become an issue, I'll be sure to use this.

Thank you both of you. I post a suggestion to vbulletin.com to add an option like the one that they had at 3.x. version with the name of forumindex file. If they place the filename in variable, you can change the name very often, so your site should be totally secure from spammers.

Even since the time of my post, I had none spam registration or post.

Maria

Why not just use a Replacement Variable?

Why do you think that I know to use all vb features? ...lol..lol... By coding for vB in no way means that I'm familiar with the use of the whole system. As coder, I follown the well known to me search and replace:D

Maria

Hi Everybody

MicroHellas, I am having a very similar problem to yours, and I have ONLY HALF SOLVED IT.

I have just purchased a VB4 Publishing Suite, and I haven't yet listed the forum's URL on Google or Yahoo, and already I have become a target for SPAMMERS AND PROFESSIONAL TIMEWASTERS, almost invariably with FAKE or INEXISTENT e-mail accounts or with e-mail accounts linked to Russian porn sites and almost invariably registering with weird or outright offensive names like SexPervert, TedBundyForever, LongLiveJeffreyDahmer, etc and then posting rubbish.

Upon advice from the VB customer service I have made the forum MODERATED in order to stop spammers and idiots from joining the forum.
However the other half of the problem which is still unsolved is the fact that I DON'T WANT the statistics to show the names of members who are still in the moderation queue and have not been approved yet by myself or another moderator.

Of course I have no desire to see my forum become a den for freaks or weirdoes, therefore, again, I don' t want anyone's name to appear on these Statistics until they have been fully approved.

Therefore can anyone please tell me, if at all possible, how to solve this
problem?

Kind regards

italcro

This sounds like the best idea I've seen yet for dealing with automated spammers. Here is some documentation on Replacement variables from vBulletin.

This approach should limit automated spammers better than anything I've seen. Part of the problem is the simplicity of google searches for sites with vbulletin files and the register.php file.

Admin CP>Styles & Templates>Replacement Variable Manager> [Add New Replacement Variable]

Then you just have to rename register.php to your replacement variable to implement this simple spam blocker

Wow.. I feel for you.

I gave the Human Verification Manager a shot and is working really nice for me, I choose the Questions and Answer way and although simple questions I don't think no robot can answer them.... yet. ;)

Good luck.

What I know is, that is 17 days now that I've activated this trick and I've 0 (zero) spamm registrations, while only in 5 days since the time that I've installed the Gold release I had 248!! At that time I was moderating new registrations but it was a time waster.

Maria