Mini Mods - Keyword weight based spam detector

I coded this one because I constantly had to moderate and / delete them lengthy lame cell phone ads on vBulletin.com's forums and my own forums. You know, buy iphone, ipod touch, noika blah blah blah sony ericsson blah blah blah etc. etc. etc. email us, we're legitimate business in a country you've never heard of, blah blah blah spam.

While Akismet does work on filtering them out, some times they still leak through.

I know there's two other keyword based tools that automatically adds things to moderation queue (One from SirAdrian and one from tweakmonkey), but it doesn't work too well for me, because I run an iPhone / iPod Touch site and I can't have those keywords on auto spam for simply appearing. So, here's what I did for mine...

What does this product do?

• Adds 1 vBulletin Options setting group, with 4 settings
• Allows you to define a list of keywords with associated score
• Allows you to set a threshold for automatic moderation
• Allows you to set a threshold for automatic rejection
• Allows you to set a post count limit for posts to be scanned
• Adds 1 plugin which gets ran at newpost_process
• Adds 1 plugin which gets ran at editpost_update_process

How does it work?
1) You configure your keyword list, and score weight. For example, I use this list:

Nokia|0.5
iPhone|0.5
iPod Touch|0.5
Order|0.5
HTC|0.5
Samsung|0.5
Sony Ericsson|0.5
hotmail|0.5
$|0.5
usd|0.5
url|0.3
email|0.5

The list basically means each time the plugin sees "Noika", it will get a score of 0.5, $, 0.5, etc. etc. A tally of all the score is totaled, and
2) You configure your moderation score, for example, I use 50.
3) You configure your rejection score, for example, I use 100.
4) You configure your exemption post count, for example, I use 5.

When a new post is being created (this could be a thread, or a reply, doesn't matter, they both trigger newpost_process hook), the plugin will count how many times each keyword appears, and total the score. If it is higher than or equal to the moderation score, it will tuck the post into moderation queue. If it is higher than or equal to the rejection score, a standard vBulletin error message is shown to the user.

How much overhead does this add? Realistically, not much... depending on amount of keywords used, I'd say most likely under 0.05 seconds of your CPU time for each post. If you are really that worried, you can set your exemption post count to something lower, and so lesser posts are scanned. Default is 5 right now.

This have been tested on 3.7.0 Beta 5, and 3.7.2. I see no reason why it would not work on 3.6.x series, too.

Change log
0.0.0 => 0.1.0

• Changed error message to use vBulletin error message screen instead of die()
• Added option for omitting after certain post count (default 5)
• Added default values to options
• Fixed options not appearing after product import (I forgot to export them for 0.0.0)
• Added scanning for editing post (AJAX doesn't seem to give error... I'll work on that for 0.1.1 later)

[youradhere4222]

Originally Posted by HuangA

Personally, I don't want to do that on my forum because of the possibility of false positives when I'm not around, and I could potentially ban someone who is genuinely interested in my forum before they even make their first post. But, I can see usefulness of that in some other forums, so I can certainly look into coding that some time this weekend or whenever I have time... no guarentee as to when I can push that out though.

I agree, but let's say you have a competing site: competingsite.com

If they were frequently spamming you, you could enter the keyword and other variations to automatically ban anyone who uses it. It could also be used to auto-ban those who use racial slurs or use words you prohibit in the rules.

[HuangA]

Yes, there are certainly benefits to it. In your described case though, I'd still take additional percautions. I have had people coming to my site and first thing thy said was something like:

I just found this site from google, comparing to <competitor site>, this is way better and easier to use. Thank you for making this possible!!

If you do add competitor site to your keyword list, I'd recommend giving it some flexibility (ie: allow two occurances in post before it trigger moderation, and three or so before it trigger reject).

As mentioned, I'll look into coding an auto ban level during the weekend coming up, and update this again

PS: I'm considering a further "profile" system where we can create different sets of keywords/weights, so we can target spam better; but one problem I can see is if we add too many sets of profiles, the math required will probably take more CPU time... Any opinions on this, anyone?

[HuangA]

Sorry, just reporting in that I had a very busy weekend so I did not got around to work on this during the weekend. I will try to allocate some time aside this weekend for this.

[veenuisthebest]

hello Andy..

This is one of the bestest spam preventing mods I have seen till now and it works perfect on my 3.7.3 PL1 board. Wonder why it has so less installs.

I think people like to stay away from mods that have a BETA tag to them. I hope you remove that BETA soon please

Thank you

[HuangA]

Thanks for the feedback, and sorry to everyone as I have not had a chance to update this because of development works... I have something similar (and hopefully even better) in the workings... stay tuned

[Chadi]

This is not working for me at all in 3.7.4

Nokia|1.0
iPhone|1.0
iPod Touch|1.0
Order|1.0
HTC|1.0
Samsung|1.0
Sony Ericsson|1.0
hotmail|1.0
$|1.0
usd|1.0
url|0.3
email|1.0

Created a regular member called test (zero post count) and attmpted to post based on the keywords. I posted Nokia about 10 times, post went through fine.

Moderate Threshold Score is set to 5
Reject Threshold Score is set to 0
Spam Scanning Post Threshold is set to 5

[veenuisthebest]

Not sure why it is not working for you. Works more than great for me on 3.7.4.

Try setting "Moderate Threshold Score is set to 50" as 5 is tooo less. And try posting a real spam post, search for it.

[tekguru]

Does this work okay on 3.8.1?

[HuangA]

The hooks for that haven't changed, I think you should be okay. Though, I don't honestly recall which version is the up most version number I've defined for this. If it tells you that your version is not compatabile, then you can try to edit the xml to get around the limitation, and then install it. In the worst case where it doesn't work, just uninstall it

[Farstate]

Great mod - works fine on 3.8.1 PL1