i am at a point where i'm sick of deleting 4-5 phony registrations each day from russian spammers. none are getting through to posting on my forum since each new registration must be human approved, but the process is tedious and after a few months, i'm wondering if there isn't a better way.
since these registrations are being done by 'bots, they are keying off their understanding of the vBulletin scripts. in particular, they only need to know where to find "register.php" for a given site, and then they can bombard the site with phony registrations.
what i'm wondering is this... why does the registration script have to be named register.php? if every site customized the name of this script for themselves and made a minor modification to the appropriate vBulletin templates, then these 'bots would be defeated, would they not?
for example, the templates that link to "register.php" could be changed to link to "xdfageystrd.php" and the "register.php" script could be renamed as "xdfageystrd.php" and everything should still work for humans following the register links in the HTML, correct? the only difference is that when a 'bot tries to directly access
www.site.com/forums/register.php (which is what i assume they are doing), it won't be able to find the register.php script, and that should stop the phony automated registrations cold... at least until the 'bots get smarter.
can anyone tell me if/where the problems are in this idea?
10-20-2006, 05:16 PM
defeating russian spammers...
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