Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Multiple account login detector (AE Detector)

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Same plug-in found here:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=125871

There are no differences as this plug-in works with the 3.5, 3.6 or 3.7 releases of vBulletin.

If you are like me and migrated from .threads, a common modification was an "AE detector", a simple mod that saved a cookie of a history of ids logged into on your site. If someone logged into more than one account, you got a PM letting you know that your site was being accessed from multiple accounts.

Over the years this was very helpful in identifying users who were posting under multiple accounts (alter-egos!) and users who would return after being banned.

You might be wondering why I don't use the vbcookie call - well, thats because on logout all vB cookies are cleared, so we need to store a cookie that is not effected by the login/logout process.

New Installation
1. Add New Product with attached XML
2. Go to vBulletin Options -> AE Multiple Login Detection Settings and set your specific settings.

Time to install: Easy - 2 minutes.

Upgrade
If you installed this as a Plug-in manually, you can delete that plugin and install this Product, just make sure to go into the Options and set them accordingly.

I hope you find this useful and will click INSTALL if you use it; should it prove useful to enough people I can look at making this installation more automated without the need for edits and an Admin Options page.

To upgrade you will want to reimport this XML file and edit your options accordingly.

1.0.3
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. Added a check to ensure that users weren't deleted when reporting violations
. added htmlspecialchars_uni call to username

Note: I am unable to get the call to construct_phrase with $vbphrase['multiplelogin_alert'] to work reliably, as such the $message variable is still set manually inside the plug-in and not via the phrase. If anyone has an idea of why this might not always work, I'm all ears.

1.0.2
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. Updated to include exclusion groups, users
. Changed so PM is sent by ae sender id

1.0.1
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. Released as a Product (thank you PHPGeek2k3 for your help)
. Added option to post to a forum versus send a PM (or both)
. All settings moved into Admin Option

1.0.0
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Initial release.

[AusPhotography]

Yes, works well on 4.1.8.

As for testing you need two regular user accounts, clear cache, login using 1st account, then logout and login using the 2nd account (in the same browser), that should trip the detector.

[gamaken]

Has anyone ever noticed if you run an IP address search on your admin account (the account you have set to report the Alternate accounts), the names and IP addresses of every AE Detector reported member shows up as your's? I thought it was strange. Anyone know why that happens?

[Alan_SP]

Yes, because you're the one that reports it.

You need to understand that IP address you get are those used when you made posts. And here we have posts made by user you decided to use to report about clone. This user's IP address is same as clone's as this mod is programmed in this fashion. It could be programmed to use some fixed IP address or some random IP address.

Anyway, on my forum I have special account created for this purpose only, to report MA.

[RedPoint]

Run this addon with vers 4.1.10 ?

[charalampos]

installed thanks !

:up:

[AusPhotography]

Originally Posted by RedPoint

Run this addon with vers 4.1.10 ?

Yes!

[tpearl5]

If anyone is using this on php 5.3 and is getting deprecated errors with the split function, which prevents people from logging in, all you have to do is replace the split functions with explode. split occurs 4 times. Nothing else should need to be changed.

[squidsk]

The better solution would be to replace the function call to split with a call to preg_split, as per the php documentation for the split command.

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by squidsk

The better solution would be to replace the function call to split with a call to preg_split, as per the php documentation for the split command.

Actually, explode is the better call. As per the TIP for split:

preg_split(), which uses a Perl-compatible regular expression syntax, is often a faster alternative to split(). If you don't require the power of regular expressions, it is faster to use explode(), which doesn't incur the overhead of the regular expression engine.

[tpearl5]

right, and since we don't need to evaluate regular expressions here, explode it is