Anti-Spam Options - Spambot Stopper - Prevent Spambots from Registering

What is it?
----------------------------
This mod rejects registrations where the form is filled out in less than a minimum time. You can configure one of the following actions to be taken when an automated registration is detected:

- Show a "No Permissions" page
- Display the "Successful Registration" message but without creating an account
- Redirect the user to any URL you choose
- Reload the registration page with an error message of your choosing

You can also provide a list of email addresses to be notified each time a registration is blocked.

Added for version 1.1.1: Time delay enforcer, maximum time option, time limits to cut down on email notifications, posting to a thread.

In the future, I'd like to add some simple logging and statistics, and a summary type of email notification (because people seem to quickly get tired of the single emails).

Note: I coded this myself from scratch, but I would like to acknowledge a couple of previous mods that used this same idea, by users Calorie and noppid, and maybe others. In any case, I believe this one adds some features that the others don't have.

Other advantages: no ads or links, no abuse of update notifications, no disappearing features, no threats to delete the mod (it will never be deleted, at least by me). Also, translations are allowed.

Installation:
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1) If you have "Is Bot", "Stop the Registration Bots", "Spammers Suck!", or another mod that works on registration time, note any admincp settings for that mod then uninstall it.

2) Import the product XML file from the Product Manager.

3) Go to Settings > Options > Spambot Stopper Options and configure the desired settings.

4) IMPORTANT: try to register a new user to make sure that there are no problems with humans registering. If you want, you can also temporarily set the minimum time to a higher value (like 60 seconds) and test to see if the spammer rejection is working.



History:
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1.1.1 (Feb 16, 2013)

• Added timer for enforcing minimum time
• Added maximum registration time limit
• Added time limits for email notifications
• Added posting notificatiosn to a thread

1.0.1 (Feb 01, 2013)

• Fixed bug
• Added check for fake timestamps

1.0 (Jan 31, 2013)

• Initial Release

[ForceHSS]

Originally Posted by Dave234

These people have posted nothing. But they put in the biography field, for example, "man" and then choose gender "female". And they have very similar names. And their email can be related to buying shoes or something. But they haven't posted anything....

I can install something for you that will help you with that won't take long pm me your site url and a temp admin login you can add me to Skype if you want (will give you that in a pm) and will share screens so you can see what I am doing but for now delete that person he is a bot

[StJack]

I've installed this mod and that went well, but Im not sure I did it all correctly. On the plus side instead of 14,000 new users with names like LKCJOERIMDLK I have none (empty board for the moment), but I want to get this sorted out before I develop the site further.

I can see 16 users (bots) all trying to hit and they are being show an error page according to the user list, but nothing is being appended to a thread I set up for this purpose. I don't care to get emails each time, but having it hit the thread would be handy.

Should the thread id be just the number or the full string?

[kh99]

Originally Posted by StJack

Should the thread id be just the number or the full string?

It should be just the number. You also need to set the option above it, "Post Notification to Thread" to Yes. Someone else was having an issue where Glow Host spam-o-matic was blocking the post. They released a new version a little while ago that was supposed to have a fix for the problem, but last I heard, the person having the problem said it still wasn't working. I haven't had a chance to try it myself.

Anyway, if you have Glow Host spam-o-matic installed, you could try disabling that temporarily to see if you start getting posts from this mod, then at least we'll know that's what the problem is.

ETA: oh, also you need to enter (in the last option) the userid (number) of a user and that will be used as the author of the posts.

[StJack]

Thanks for the response.

Yep, it is enabled for sending messages to a thread.
the thread is set using just the number.
I have it set to use userid 1 (which is a valid account) and I have tried both the number and the full string
13932
13932-Thread-for-block-posts

I only have the Q&A enabled, maybe that's the thing blocking them? Its possible I guess, I can turn that off for a while.

I will let it cook another day, see if anything shows up.

[kh99]

Hmm...well, if you have people being blocked based on time, then you should be seeing notices. Have you tried registering a test account yourself to make sure it's working? You can also turn off "Force Wait for Minimum Time", and set the min time higher, then register in less than the min time and see what happens (although on a live site you could potentially block real users while you've got it configured for testing).

[StJack]

well, its doing something ... I turned it off for 5 minutes, removed it, installed it, configured it, and in those 5 minutes I had new users and garbage showing up. So its working, just not the posting to the thread part.

[StJack]

Ok the piece that disables the 'proceed' buton on the registration form works, if i set it to 300 seconds its unusable until the time expires, but if i leave the button alone the registration is still processed whether the time expired or not. Im running 4.2.1 of vb, is this too new? Until I get the bot thing sorted out Im not opening up to the world so there are no users yet, I can blow it all away and start from scratch. Also, could this be due to some web hosting limitation of the php config? Im not sure how this works, but I would expect it is just comparing timestamps of when the form loads to when it is submitted, which shouldnt be reliant on any special php functions.

[kh99]

Originally Posted by StJack

Ok the piece that disables the 'proceed' buton on the registration form works, if i set it to 300 seconds its unusable until the time expires, but if i leave the button alone the registration is still processed whether the time expired or not.

What do you mean by "leave the button alone"?

Im running 4.2.1 of vb, is this too new?

I haven't tried it on 4.2.1, but I'll do that this morning. Otherwise I don't think there's any php version issues. What version of php are you running? I haven't tried it with 5.4 since I believe vb4 only supports 5.3 or lower (I'm not sure about those numbers).

[StJack]

By leave button alone I mean turn off the option to disable the button until the timer expires. Im not manually editing any code, all change are made via the plugin management form.

PHP on my host is 5.2.17

[kh99]

Oh, OK. And php5.2 should be OK. Let me try it on 4.2.1 and see if it works and we'll figure out where to go from there.