Turn off MD5'ing of passwords

[oO RusH Oo]

Hello everyone, :]

I've had quite a few bots attack my sites recently, either posting a whole stream of adverts, or trying every exploit in the book against my sites.

I'm fed up, so i've decided to do something about it!

Their are a few tools which generate these bots, most of them use dynamic usernames, however i don't belive that they dynamically generate passwords.

Even if they are, i can make a list of e-mail addresses/IP's/common proceedures that these bots use, and use it to block out bots in the future.

So basically i'm making a vBulleting Honeypot - but to prevent ligitimate users from signing up, i've made it very clear in the registration letter that the forum is not real, and if they don't verify their e-mail address their password will be deleted within the hour.

Only problem is, it would take ages to decrypt the md5'd passwords in the database of the bots, and if i have four or five bots a day attack my site, it just isn't realistic...

A much better idea is for vBulletin to just compair plaintext passwords, and i could scan through the mySQL DB and spot any similarities that way.

I know older versions of vBulletin didn't use MD5, but reverting back to this is too complicated for me :P

Could anyone give me any pointers?

Cheers guys,

~ John