New form of Spam

[yankidank]

I've been moderating a VB forum for about three years now and I've come across many types of spam that are usually pretty simple to catch and ban. I even wrote an article about how I stop vBulletin spam in case anyone is interested. Anyways, today I discovered a new method that spammers are using to get around my several spam checks and I'm trying to figure out if there's a solution to stop it.

Spammers are creating accounts and copy/pasting existing posts into their own new threads. By doing this they are getting around my safeguards that require that users have X number of posts before they can have a signature. Nobody is reporting the new spam because it looks legit, but out of context.

Is there any current mod for vBulletin that checks for duplicate content before approving a post? That sort of mod would save the day for me. Thanks for your help guys/gals.

[snakes1100]

Seeing as its a different user, vb itself wont check that, i do not know of any current hack that checks different users for the same identical post, you could post here in free requests forum, someone might make one for you or you could post a paid job.

I dont really see that as a viable option anyways, if you site has 500,000 posts, imagine the load that mysql & the server would incur because your trying to check every new post against the current posts you already have.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Originally Posted by snakes1100

I dont really see that as a viable option anyways, if you site has 500,000 posts, imagine the load that mysql & the server would incur because your trying to check every new post against the current posts you already have.

There are some technical solutions possible that would not have a high impact on the server load. For example you could create a hash of the posttext upon posting/editing and store that within the post table. Compairing the database if a hash already exists should not have a large impact on the performence.

[Hex_legend]

There's a hack that uses AJAX that looks for posts and makes you select a different title etc if its got the same content. I dont know what its called.

[yankidank]

I'll look around for that mod Hex, thanks for the suggestion.

[snakes1100]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

There are some technical solutions possible that would not have a high impact on the server load. For example you could create a hash of the posttext upon posting/editing and store that within the post table. Compairing the database if a hash already exists should not have a large impact on the performence.

Nice Marco, didnt think about that.