Interest Level Check & Need experienced vBulletin hacker if there is interest

[fsw]

I have been thinking about throwing together a registration/post filter system for awhile that could easily stop human and bot spammers in their tracks.

Problem is - I do not have much free time right now.

Writing the code is no problem for me - I can do that in my sleep. The problem is that while I once new basically every line of code in vBulletin 1.x and 2.x - I have not had the time to play around with 3.x more than just quick, minor changes, and I still do not have time to figure out the plugin system (though I am sure its simple).

So if there is someone who knows the plugin/product system that would be interested in assisting me with this - then I could actually do it.

Also would be interested in knowing if there is any interest in this type thing - as its a hack that would actually require usage by a decent number of people to be effective for anybody.

What I propose is simple

1. It would operate off of a central repository
2. The only information that would be sent to the repository is a spam/malware report. That would include the IP address used, username, hashed password (hashed and seeded multipletimes so it would be impossible to tell what it really was), text of the message, email address, sig line, and any other registration info the spammer put in. Basically everything that could help in automatically identifying their garbage.
3. It would also track who submitted the spam report so weight could be given over time to the accuracy of the reports received based on the accuracy of the submitter.
4. Options on what to do with a post or registration that is both a certain spammer, and ones that are just suspicious. ie - a new users registers, with an IP reported multiple times with the same username, password, and sig line that has also been reported mulltiple times - that would be a certain spammer, where as someone posts a link that is known to be posted by spammers, and that is the only thing that is similiar - that would be only be suspicious.
5. Set usergroups and/or post counts of users that are never checked.

Thats off the top of my head - probably forgetting something in there. The way it would work is you would have the data files of known/suspected spammers sitting on your server. Any new registrations and/or posts/threads that are not posted by exempt usergroups/post counts would be checked against those data files. Since you would more than likely block out Admin/Mods/and people that have decent post counts, only a fraction of your posts would ever be checked.

The data files would either update by cron from your server running at an interval you set, or they could be updated realtime by being sent new info as it comes in.

You would also set options to decide what level of certainy the info you check against is.

Options would have to be pretty extensive so each different forum operator can set the filtering rules to their satisifaction.

With posts - it would first check any URLs that are posted in them for matching hosts and/or exact matches. It would also do a quick check of the registration info of the domain of a url, host country of the IP, etc. ...


I could keep typing - but I think this is enough to get the idea .

So if there is both an interest from someone in helping me that knows the vBulletin side of things, and an enough forum operators interested to make it worthwhile - well - I can go from there when I know the answers to those two questins