Who might this New User be?

Hiyas,

When a new user registers your board, this hack analyzes his email, password, ip address and isp (ranged ip) against existing board members and produces a sorted list with probabilities about who this new user might be. (See screenshot below). This list will be emailed to you with new user notification mail. (The probabilities can be modified by you so it's you who decide how matched results are sorted and ranked, dont blame me!)

Tested and will work better in relatively smaller boards (less than 3000 members). If you have a small board, this hack may help you a bit to track and pinpoint existing users if they re-register with different usernames. For large boards, IMO it's pointless to track new users anyway..

As far as I know it will work with ANY vbulletin version so feel free to try. Installation is very easy, actually 2 simple steps and will take you 2 minutes to apply..

If they change their both ip, isp, password and email, the hack cant get them, yeah I know! This is the best we can do with computer technologies. If you have higher expectations and demands, you may regard consulting a "Seer"..

If you liked this hack, I suggest checking Jawelin's nice Paranoid dupe user buster when moderating Hack too. They make a good couple and I use them both.

Click Install button, if you installed the hack, thank you!

Enjoy! \=^))

Logician

[Logician]

Originally posted by marc49
Is it possible to even have the ability to check existing members? I realize it would probably have to be a whole seperate hack, but would it be something that would be fairly easy for you guys to do?

Mark they look same, their algorithm is similiar either but if you want to do a good job, you have to restructure the hack to code your request. Here is a technical info:

In "who might this user be" hack, the hack retrieves the IP address (email and password too) of the new user and searches BOTH the message database and userdatabase to match the IPs (and ISPs). You have only one IP to check against other users IPs, so handling it is easier.

However if you want to check an existing member's IP inside the database, things changes because he might be a dynamic IP owner and an active poster which means he may have tens of different IPs recorded in your database. If you want to do a good analyze as this hack does, you have to take all these IPs one by one and search them inside your database. This can be time consuming if he has too many IPs or if your database is big or your MYSQL server is slow. Moreover this means you have to code this hack quite differently than this hack. So it's not really possible to make a quick adoptation, in the coder view, you have to handle things differently by coding it from the scratch.

I may try working on it sometimes but sorry not soon..

[Learner29]

Logician please contact me via private message.....

I am sending you a big big bar of swiss chocolate...

[Logician]

Originally posted by Learner29
Logician please contact me via private message.....

I am sending you a big big bar of swiss chocolate...

Hey I love Swiss chocolate (and Switzerland too)!.. Too bad I'm on a diet :glasses: You'd better eat it for me..

Glad you liked the hack..

[KarateKid]

great hack, thank you

*install*

[Night Owl]

Is there any way to include the referring site in the email?

[Logician]

Originally posted by Night Owl
Is there any way to include the referring site in the email?

if you use $referrername variable in the mail template you get, it should give you the refering username if any..

[Kathy]

I like the idea of this and downloaded it to take a look at the files. It says in your README that it does fine with smallish communities.

What could I do for my large one?

Could I have new registrations check with the banned (or other user group I specify?.... I have an "almost banned" usergroup that has no privileges other than posting...)

Could this hack work if instead of it comparing to all the members (over 21,000 now) could it compare to the few in the banned group and in this special group I created and maybe the option to add additional names we are suspicous of and keeping an eye on?

thanks for your help on if this is tweakable. :-)

[Logician]

Kathy by default the hack is not suggested for large communities for 2 reasons:
1- In large communities with a lot of members hack will match many users with same IP or ISP or password so wouldnt give you a good idea as to whom the new user might be.
2- Hack does not only compare IPs in the user database but also in the post database to give more accurate results and if you have a large database (user or posts or both) it would take a very long time to match new registerar's IP in the database which will result in a slowdown in register process.

So it's not good for you as it is.

But I guess it can be tweaked so that it will only compare IPs of banned members and warn you if a "potential" banned member re-registers or even better put him in a special usergroup (like moderated) if the hack decides new user is likely a "banned member". :glasses:

[Bitmap]

i just installed the hack but i am having a little problem on my testboard (2.2.8).

everything works fine, but when i am finished with registering i get the following error:

Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/websites/test/htdocs/forum/register.php:587) in /home/websites/test/htdocs/forum/admin/functions.php on line 1655

Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/websites/test/htdocs/forum/register.php:587) in /home/websites/test/htdocs/forum/admin/functions.php on line 1655

i looked up the line and there it says

    header($cookieheader, false); // force multiple headers of same type
  } else {
    setcookie($name, $value, $expire, $cookiepath, $cookiedomain, $secure);

any ideas?

[Logician]

Originally posted by Bitmap
i just installed the hack but i am having a little problem on my testboard (2.2.8).

What's the line (around) 587 in register.php?