Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Ultimate Spambot Killer (Stable)

With this software, your board connects to one of the most powerful email checking engines available. The engine itself is accessed and maintained remotely. For this reason, product updates are rare.

Please try this product first on a test board. It requires access to an external URL via CURL or fopen().

If you experience timeouts, white pages or similar during the registration process of a new user, your hosting plan does not allow to access external pages or is generally overloaded. In order to complete a remote request, the script timeout should allow for 30 seconds of execution. Most requests are returned after a few seconds, but some DNS or mail servers may take more time to reply.

If CURL is installed, this will be used as the preferred method, else fopen(). One of the methods must allow to access external sites else it won't work at all.

New for version 1.1.3:
- Missing Scheduled Task Entry.

New for version 1.1.2:
- Daily cron-job for setting Update IP Censor List to your vBulletin User Banning Options. This feature retrieves the most recent blacklisted IP addresses and simply denies access to notoriously known spammers and spam sustainers. In the options, you may refer to a different script. This cron-job is by default disabled. You may switch it on in your vBulletin Scheduled Tasks. Also, it will need to set Enable Banning Options: Yes in order to make this feature work. Please note that if enabled, eventually existing IP Censor List entries are replaced.

- Time-zone restrictions for new users. When new users register from an unsupported time-zone, you may deny access or place those users in the moderation queue.

New for version 2.0.0:
- General service revision (backend)
- Detailed error messages during registration. This makes it easier for your subscribers to understand, why an email box is rejected, but also to spammers how to circumvent. Now it is up to you to decide what information to show and what to hide - using the translation system (phrase prefix: usk_).
- No options, no files, no tasks, no time-zones, no user moderation, just a backend call and a reply.

If you wish to use version 2+, please uninstall the 1+ versions first.

Compatibility: vBulletin 3.6.5+, 3.7.x, 3.8.x, 4.x

[F0xy]

looks good, i'm going to try this once i get a moment

[pnosko31]

sounds good though i already use another one i found on here that checks http://www.stopforumspam.com/

[y2ksw]

Yup, if I knew about that before I probably wouldn't have started my adventure

It is a different solution though, so I'm fortunate enough not to gain fame about stealing other people's ideas

[pnosko31]

well anything that keeps spammers and spam bots off a forum is a good thing

[y2ksw]

From 1st december 2008 onwards, we will accept only requests which contain IP's and eventually email addresses.

Since this is primarily a service against spammers and not a service for testing if an email box exists or less, the current feature to allow either the email address and/or the IP will be changed. For all those who wish to verify only the presence of an email box could use one of the freely available vBulletin plugins which implement this feature only.

Service users who will continue to pass an email address only, will receive feedback only about the validity of the literal email address format, while an IP check only will still work as before.

[JJWhite]

Possible to add a log to see how many were allowed vs rejections?

[y2ksw]

On this page you may see the difference between service calls and rejected calls.

The service call statistics have been introduced quite late. For this reason it will take some time to catch up and become realistic. Please take in account that about 75-85% of all registering attempts on connected networks are coming from spammers.

I don't know if local logging would be of a great advantage, since it would require to add quite some code in order to make the collected data comfortable to read and observe.

[Daggerzz]

I uploaded this to my site and I tried to register with my e-mail address and it said Invalid e-mail address I uninstalled and it worked fine was I doing something wrong?

[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by Daggerzz

I uploaded this to my site and I tried to register with my e-mail address and it said Invalid e-mail address I uninstalled and it worked fine was I doing something wrong?

If your server's IP is blacklisted on SORBS, sbl.spamhaus.org, xbl.spamhaus.org or bl.spamcannibal.org, it can not access our service. We have added this protection quite some time ago in order to avoid registration attempts from already compromised systems.

Similarly, if you are trying to register from home (probably a dynamic IP), and this IP has been used for spamming, it finished probably in the Spamhaus XBL list, and thus you are not allowed to register. Also, your PC may be infected by a worm which sends spam to our honey-pot, and thus gets blacklisted.

In addition, if your mail server was down, or your mailbox was filled completely (mailbox quota exceeded), you will not be able to register, because you never would receive the activation email anyway.