vBulletin Mods

BadgerDog

functions_vbghsfs.php is from easier versions of this mod.

functions_ghsom.php is the name of this file in 1.2.5+

Anyways, this information was for the other poster who didn't upload the file, so it should not affect you.

Understood ... so can I delete functions_vbghsfs.php from my server?

Follow up ... v1.25 is NOT sending information to ADD spammers to stopforumspam.com. I've tested it several times using the AdminCP function add-on panel you provide in the users screen and nothing ever arrives and is placed in their database.

I don't know if it works through the moderation "delete as spam" function as I haven't had a spammer get through to be able to post a message.

I am able to manually go to their site and add spammers to their database.

1.25 is working to analyze and stop spammers from registering ...

Regards,
Badger

Thank you to you both. Had the same issue this morning. I dunno how I overlooked the file install.

Thanks for the quick fix!

~Brian

I've decided to uninstall this mod. After looking at the logs for the past month, I have come to the following conclusions...

• My forum rejects 9 out of 10 registration requests from spammers.
• This mod is only responsible for ONE out of those 9 rejections.
• The amount of false-positives is not worth the hassle.
• Akismet has NEVER (and I mean NEVER) returned anything other than a false positive.

The other 8 of those 9 rejections were done using a custom profile field:

• Simple Question: Are you a spam bot?
• Default Value: Yes
• Field Required: No, but display at registration
• Regular Expression: [NOno]+

Its simple. When someone registers, right before the submit button is this question "Are you a spam bot?"; with the default being "Yes". Unless they change the answer to "no", they will be rejected. This simple thing is responsible for almost all of my spam rejections.

Any bots that do get through eventually get caught by this:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=248560

Well, 1 is better than none I would say.

Why not just turn off the Akismet option if it doesn't work for your purposes? Is that the only thing giving false positives?

The question thing you have does work good and is a great thing unless everyone uses the same questions on their forums. The spambots can easily be trained to answer that type of question. The mods I have seen with such systems all have the same questions which sort of defeats the purpose.

Yes unless you want to run version 1.2.4 or earlier.

How are you checking that? The results do not appear on their site for quite a while after submission. Last we tested, it was something like an hour before you could see them when posting from the API. I guess they have a cron setup to save server resources.

Are your logs updated indicating the submission was successful? If yes, then they were submitted because that is a response from SFS indicating the successful submission.

I turned Akismet off a week after I installed this mod. The false positives I am talking about now are during registration when this mod rejects legitimate users. I get emails from users all the time who ask for help registering because they get rejected on some random ip check.

Me too.

I see. Well, the 2 suggestions I have for that would be to:

1) Turn off the IP check
or
2) keep IP check on and turn "StopForumSpam: Remote Expiry" down to something less less, like 10 so that only newly found IPs are checked, instead of stuff from 3 months ago (90)

At the end of the day, if it is picking up their IPs spam did come from that IP at some point. Likely those who complain are in Internet cafes overseas where spammers like to play, which ends up getting everyone punished.

Might encourage them to find a more reliable ISP that better controls spam if that is the case.

On the other hand, if that IP has been playing nice lately, and you set a low threshold of 10 or so, it might help you and the users since that IP would be expired from results.

The email check is the most effective anyways, so simply turning off the IP check is probably best for your situation since your other registration checks seem to be strong enough for you.

Hope it helps, if not, I tried. :)

It's been over 8 hours and the submissions we tested under 1.25 are still not appearing.

I can find no record of any submission in the user logs for either of the tests we conducted ...

Regards,
Badger

Can you try it using the moderation tool to delete posts as spam and see if it ends up in the logs and SFS DV? Perhaps there is a problem with the combination of options that you are choosing when submitting from the user profile in admincp.

I did find one bug there for another reported issue where a certain combination of options just reloaded the page, that is fixed but I would like to see if we can pinpoint your issue before making another release.

I could, but I need a legitimate spammer to break through the defenses and post a thread that is spam, in order to be able to use 1.25 to delete it as spam and test it.

Will advise as soon as I have that set of circumstances ....

BTW, still no sign of the spammers I sent to StopForumSpam using the AdminCP add-on for user settings, so there must be a problem with that part of it ...

Regards,
Badger

I suggest disabling email, username and IP checks for a while so that a spammer can get on your boards otherwise we may be waiting a while for one to get through the system.

Any chance you could release the fix for the problem that I am experiencing?

I'd like to patch them both at the same time and stop development of the 1.x tree.

The first reason being is I don't want to make a new release every day for minor issues that have workarounds (this one has a workaround, which is to delete posts as spam instead of using the user option in admincp)

The second reason being this function is deprecated in version 2.0 which we are in release candidate stages for version 2.0 already. I am trying not to back-pedal too much.

In 2.0 the function in the user profile has been removed in favor of an option on the moderator tools called "Spam-O-Matic" in the postbit which will take care of everything without having to login to admincp, find the user, select the options, and ban them which is a time consuming process.

Everything is done in one step from the post itself in version 2.