vbSpamBuster v0.2
 

Following the release of vB SpamBuster v0.1 earlier in the week I've added some of the improvements based on the discussion about it.

This version is a complete rewrite over v0.1 and adds the major features:

• Moves spam into the moderation queue rather than giving the user a "permission denied error"
• Has a highly configurable scoring system

As you can see the ruleset is fairly small at the moment I still think that it will catch a lot of spam posts. Any help/feedback from people running the system and either getting "false positives" or want to add any better rules to the default list please let me know.

Installation instructions

Download spambuster-libs.php and spambuster-rules.php.

You may wish to edit the define values at the top of the spambuster-libs.php file. Later on you might want to edit the rules in spambuster-rules.php too.

Upload spambuster-libs.php and spambuster-rules.php into your includes directory.

In both newthread.php and newreply.php find:
after it add:
In newthread.php find:
after it add:
Now in newreply.php find:
after it add:
As ever any feedback would be gratefully received.

Thanks for sharing :) UK jimbo

Man I'd love to add a whole list of expressions to this kind of code!

==============================
visit our website

visit our web site

promotional

marketing

campaign

thousands

New web site

Urgent! Please Read!

work at home

earn a living

earn quickly

join our company

Fire Your boss

Just a couple then, huh? LOL

Great idea *clicks install*

I should explain that I come to vBulletin after running eight years of WebBBS on my server. That script has a "naughty words" function that allows you to have a file of words or phrases that then kicks those posts into the moderated bin as they come in.

This has worked excellently for Nigerian scam posts and the typical overnight spam crap that gets posted from the far east. In fact, it worked so well that I created a duplicate function for the blind email system. This stopped Nigerian scam responses to my classified ads cold!

This is the first time that a hack to vBulletin has even come close to solving these problems. UK Jimbo, I support your work on this hack and I have subscribed to this thread. I realize that this was initially set up to block URL links, but if you have an example as to how my phrase word file could be coded into $spam_exprs, I'd surely appreciate it. Otherwise the number of $spam_exprs in the code could get lengthy.

EDIT: I have tried this hack in my testvb and it works fine. Now for the refinements of kicking those posts into the moderated mode.

It would be really great if you could implement the definition of the spam_exprs into the admin control panel. Also a logfunction would be nice to have.

There is very little spam on my board, but I still very much support any effort in this direction. Great work

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

As time permits I'm going to be looking at:

• adding the detection to newreply.php
• dropping bad posts into a moderation queue
• logging/reporting trapped posts
• configuration via the admincp (with possible word list import/export)

Actually, to me it seems like adding your newthread.php code in the corresponding place in newreply.php would do the trick

With all due respect, wouldn't it just be easier to not let new users post URLs?

Yup - but you can't do that with vBulletin out of the box can you?

Just drop the regular expression http:// into the config for this hack and hey presto you'd be able to do that.