Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Moderate New Registrations Based On IP Geographical Origin

This mod will put any new registration into moderation so you can either approve or deny based on the physical location of the IP address. If the IP is located in a country that you white list, the registration will go through as normal.

This may be different for everyone else, but on my forums, I have yet to have a Russian IP sign up for anything other than posting SPAM. This plugin has moderated them all!

I hope to have time to eventually expand this to do other things. This also works on 3.8.x.

You MUST download the zone files from this site:

http://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks/

The free license does not allow me to include them with the product, plus it is better to download the latest files anyway.

No real screenshots to show here, sorry.

Changelog:

12/20/2008

• Coded the routine in, instead of using external whois program.
• Now compatible with Windows
• (39 download of 1.0)

2/11/2009

• 77 downloads at this point
• Rewrote application to use zone files rather than relying on Arin

12/27/2009

• Verified it works for 4.0

To upgrade, READ THE README, and re-install product (select overwrite).

Don't forget to:

CLICK INSTALL!

Developed by a Lampwright!

[The_Hawk]

I should add that I also have this hack installed which provides a notification like new PM's and allows SuperMods to take action (instead of just admin). The other bonus is that there is a "BAN" button rather than just a deleting the ones you don't want (which means the spammers can just reuse those email addresses again).
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=2015393

Problem is that this mod only works if you turn on moderation for ALL users… What I wanted to do was make the option appear in the ModCP WITHOUT turning on the "Moderate New Members" option.

To fix this problem I found that editing the xml install file and the user_moderation.php file removing the references to $vbulletin->options['moderatenewmembers'] means this little hack doesn't check to see if the moderate new members flag is on, but still checks everything else and still only allows supermods access. (which is exactly what I want).

While I understand this isn't supported by the creator (Mosh), it's only a minor mod and is easy enough to reverse if ever needed.

[chriske]

So if I block for instance all users from Russia. Will those ip addresses never change?

Like you block: 117.55.192.0/20
Is there a chance that ip address will be used by an other country in the future?

[The_Hawk]

I don't know enough to answer that question for you.... BUT, if you update the zones files every now and again you should be good

[The_Hawk]

I have been having massive issues as it seems that the list on the website:
http://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks/
doesn't include a bunch of ranges that I know are valid in Australia.

I used to get maybe one or two false positives a week, not it's more like three or four per day... sometimes more.

In any case at the moment I have added a new zone file xx.zone which I grabbed from here (for Australian in my case):
http://ipinfodb.com/ip_country_block.php#blocklist

I have then added the new XX domain to the "IP address exclusions" list in vBulletin which *should* now add those addresses to the exclusion list.

Now I KNOW that there is going to be cross over between my new XX zone and the original au.zone list from ipdeny. Hopefully this doesn't cause any issues... although I suppose we will see soon enough.

Fingers crossed it helps things.

[TheDevil666Damo]

Any plans to release this for vbulletin 5 connect?

[dknelson]

I've been running this on my 3.8 board for a LONG time and it has been fantastic. I just started a new site running the latest version of VB4. This installed fine and all the zone files are uploaded. US and CA are excluded but ALL new registrations are going to the moderation que. I've seen other reports of this same problem in this thread but have seen no answers as to why or how to correct it. Anybody know?

[asabet]

Ipdeny.com doesn't seem to have a working download for "all" zone files. I have tried multiple times yesterday and today to download the GZ file, and it seems to download properly but has a file size of 0 bytes and contains no data. Tried on both Mac and PC with no luck.

[The_Hawk]

Even downloading them individually gives 0kb results in many cases. It's had issues for a couple of months now

[ForceHSS]

Originally Posted by The_Hawk

Even downloading them individually gives 0kb results in many cases. It's had issues for a couple of months now

noticed the files from http://www.ipdeny.com/ipblocks are messed up

[datoneer]

I'm using vbulletin 4.2.2. I can't open this file all-zones.tar.gz, it says archive is damaged, what now?