A trick to send spammers to hell (or anywhere you want!)

[MaryTheG(r)eek]

Hello to all,

I think that most of you, have the same problem with me. Huge amount of spam posts in my site. I have tried any possible way to fight spam, but except the post moderation (which is a time waster), nothing was working.

A few days ago, an idea came to my mind, a simple way to do it, which finally seems to work fine, as I've 0 (zero) spam since that day. Even if the idea is simple, it's needs some knowledge to follow it, so try it in your own risk.

What you've to do (follow the steps one by one):

1. Turn your site off
2. Rename the file register.php to anything you like. eg I've renamed it to microrgister.php
3. Do a Search and Replace for the string register.php (case sensitive) with the name of the new file (don't forget the .php extention), in the files:
   1. The file that you've just renamed (eg in my case microregister.php)
   2. functions_online.php at /includes
   3. md5_sums_vbulletin.php at /includes
   4. email.php at /admincp
   5. user.php at /admincp
4. Upload these files to your site
5. Login to your AdminCP
6. Goto Styles & Templates -> Search in Templates -> Find & Replace
7. Search for register.php ..... Replace with the new filename (don't forget the extention .php). Set "Test Replacement Only" to NO
8. Here you've to click many times "Continue", but actually the changes are in a few only templates (You'll see them marked in red).
9. Now goto Languages & Phrases -> Search in Phrases and search for register.php setting Case-sensitive to YES
10. As I remember it's about 6-8 phrases to change. 3 of them (email phrases) have more than one (4) replacements.
11. That's all

As a final step, if you want to have some fun, write a file register.php with a redirection to anywhere you like and then upload it to your site. A sample code for this file is:

<?php
   header("location:http://www.spammers.com");
?>

I repeat, that, if you're not familiar with such change don't even think to try it. A disadvantage is that Jelsoft releases very often new versions, so (as I believe) you've to repeate it in the future.

Maria