Mini Mods - Prevent Spam Posts

Description
This will allow you to automatically scan new posts from new members for common spam keywords. If any are found, the post/thread will be sent to the moderation queue to prevent their spam from having any affect. If your filter is very strict, and a regular user happens to trigger it, no harm is done because your moderators can just approve the post.

Options

• Maximum Posts - this will only scan posts posted by users who have this many (or less) posts. Usually spammers only post 1-5 times!

• Keywords - a list of keywords (or any strings) to be searched. Remember it doesn't match a whole word, so a keyword of "[url" will block the user from posting any links. This is NOT case sensitive!

3.5 Users:
A 3.5x version XML file is also included.

[tobybird]

Just noticed a couple things this morning...

1. For some odd reason a message popped into the moderation queue because it contained a thread smilie/post icon.

2. All members with 10 or fewer posts as determined with this hack are seeing a Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter. in /global.php(360) : eval()'d code on line 166 message as they are redirected.

eta: Just as an fyi... I did disable all other hacks I have running to be certain the message was being caused by this mod and it seems to be.

[AntonyF]

Originally Posted by AntonyF

Hi there. Excellent hack, just what we wanted. However I installed it and ran into a problem. Everyone on the board couldn't post attachments; it said they were over quota even though we don't set quota. Very odd. I turned this mod off, then they could attach again. Any ideas? We're on 3.6.4, I know this mod is for 3.6.3 and perhaps that's the problem? Thanks.

Don't worry about this now. I went for an alternative, and that works sweet.

[Maerten]

Hi, I'm not a specialist in vBulletin but with this plugin members cannot see there own post that's being moderated and they will try to post the message again. This is a time consuming work for the moderators. I'm not sure if there's an other solution for this but I changed the plugin so that showthread displays a member own posts even if there posts are being moderated. Other members down't see there posts.
Is there an other (standard) solution for this? Is anyone interested in my solution?

[Adrian Schneider]

Originally Posted by tobybird

Just noticed a couple things this morning...

1. For some odd reason a message popped into the moderation queue because it contained a thread smilie/post icon.

2. All members with 10 or fewer posts as determined with this hack are seeing a Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter. in /global.php(360) : eval()'d code on line 166 message as they are redirected.

eta: Just as an fyi... I did disable all other hacks I have running to be certain the message was being caused by this mod and it seems to be.

Hi,

1) should depend on your filtering... AFAIK I haven't had any problems with smilies yet.

2) If you want me to help debug that I'll need AdminCP access (w/ plugin permission) to your board. PM if interested.

Originally Posted by Maerten

Hi, I'm not a specialist in vBulletin but with this plugin members cannot see there own post that's being moderated and they will try to post the message again. This is a time consuming work for the moderators. I'm not sure if there's an other solution for this but I changed the plugin so that showthread displays a member own posts even if there posts are being moderated. Other members down't see there posts.
Is there an other (standard) solution for this? Is anyone interested in my solution?

This is a standard vBulletin feature, so I would suggest any alternatives to them - all my code does is trigger what already exists.


BTW, I took a quick stab at the edit moderation... the feature doesn't even exist in vBulletin so it would be a pain. How many of you actually have spammers get around the initial post/thread creation and are editing posts? Nobody has done it on my board yet so it's not an immediate concern for me.

[DementedMindz]

Originally Posted by SirAdrian

1) should depend on your filtering... AFAIK I haven't had any problems with smilies yet.

I had it a few times with smileys but i rather a smiley set it off then see spam on my site.

[Adrian Schneider]

I did some testing with the empty delimiter problem, and it seems that it is caused when the search string (needle) is empty. So this would happen if your keyword list isn't separated properly.

ex: using 2 spaces instead of 1

Anyway, if you are having this problem check your keyword listing, and if you can't find anything obvious post it here for me to look at.

[sportsoutlaw]

Originally Posted by tobybird

2. All members with 10 or fewer posts as determined with this hack are seeing a Warning: strpos() [function.strpos]: Empty delimiter. in /global.php(360) : eval()'d code on line 166 message as they are redirected.

I ran into this on a new forum a little while ago. In addition to this, you will get a note saying "an error has occured" on quick replies using ajax.

After reading this thread, I verified that it was in fact due to having two spaces between one of the words in my filter. Removed the extra space and the problem was gone.

I don't know if this can be done or not, but is there a way to make it where a word is added "per line" instead of the "one space" between them? Really easy to get two spaces in between these words, and unless you are testing with a user account that has less than the number of posts required, you may never know it. I wasn't seeing this issue from my admin account.

[Adrian Schneider]

Edit the plugin that uses the explode function, and change the first parameter to "\n" instead of ' '.

[RobinPriestley]

Thanks for this, I installed it and it works great.

The only problem is, I registered a test user to try it with, and it caught my spam. However now if I try and post with that user I get this message:

Unable to add cookies, header already sent.
File: /homepages/25/d169220611/htdocs/forum/includes/class_core.php
Line: 3023

any clues what it means.

Cheers,

Robin

[hennanra]

Originally Posted by SirAdrian

Scanning the title is possible, so I'll add that to the next version. Banning or auto-deleting the post isn't really what this is about, and will be problematic when you get false positives (though that depends on your keywords).

I would really really appreciate this mod for the title too. My main concern is it is only a matter of time until spammers realise that they can put URL or spam words in title, they only want somewhere to stick this and any box where they can enter information serves this purpose. Arguably even the user name e.g.:

User: www.visitmysite.com
Title: Legitimate text
Post: Legitimate Text

Effectively, for this mod to be spam proof, I feel all 3 components would need to be protected. One other thing that would be amazing (sry - I am really not requesting, just suggesting of something that will improve) is if you can moderate users based on names as an extension of this.

I have many users setting up accounts with swear words and the like as usernames and this appears in the "most recent joiners" list at the bottom and looks very bad - I am sure you can use your imagination to think of the types of names that appear there :-).

The biggest part of this is perception, this is the best hack out there by far and I have installed, I feel a few more mods will prevent even a whiff of spam getting through and hopefully consign spammers to getting a real job!.

NB, I also experienced the delimiter and unable to add cookies errors when we did a clean install of vBulletin. We had to install this several times, can't remember how my developer got working in the end.

Kind Regards (and thanks for the best mod on this forum),
Raheel