vBulletin Mods

Thanks ... :)

I think that's what's happening and why our registered member with 18 posts got stuck in moderation. Spam-O-Matic is checking every post through Akismet, instead of only checking the first post (that's when you nail spammers), which is the way we had the VBulletin Akismet set (stop checking after first post).

I'll turn OFF your Akismet and leave ON vBulletin's until you are able to add that option. I'll also continue testing for you ...

Regards,
Badger

There's enough confusion on the first three pages that need to be made very clear, you might think I'm being rude I just want everyone to actually benefit from your mod, if they can't understand something or become confused because it's not made clear in the actual Modification post then they will quit and not even try to install you should know this from being on here so long "Join Date: 22 Nov 2005".

Also, posting on page three will not save others from searching up until page three or backtracking if this ever reaches let's say page 40 etc so simply modify the modification info and put that bold text up there ;).

Ok back to work for me, you handle your mod, like I said I like the concept but was simply taken back reading your post about being unaware of the default settings especially since your a "Host" that most likely releases free mods to get more vBulletin clients.

@Badger
Thanks for the feedback and testing :)

@Superman
Changed first page (again) the mod is only a few days old to for release to the public so yes the description being constantly updated. Hopefully the first page says everything there is to know now. FAQ also added.

Still waiting to here if there are other users that have RSS issues, I can't duplicate them. If you find a way to duplicate the problem with specific examples, let us know.

Quick question. I installed the mod and ran into users getting tagged by akismet checking every post. I will disable that feature after reading the previous posts.

I was looking at the logs and it lists like 116 entries. I just installed the mod today and I know I have never had 116 new registrations in one day. Where are all these log entries pulled from? I am just curious since I see a lot of usernames that say "Allowed registration" and I don't see them in my member list.
I did notice that some of the usernames are linked, which leads me to believe that those specific usernames are legit new registrations for my site.


Thanks for this mod. We are hoping it catches the spammers trying to register so we don't have to worry about them

Yes, the linked users are the ones that were really allowed registration. There is a known issue with the logs making duplicate entries and sometimes saying "allowed registration" for users who were really not allowed.

It will be fixed in a later release, it is a cosmetic bug and not a functionality bug.

As for the high number of log entries, that is normal even without the dupes. There are lots of bots running around out there that get denied on the default human verification settings or just give up or die in the registration process. Spam-O-Matic tries to tag them all.

wow, I forgot all about the bots not getting past the recaptcha stuff. Thanks for the info. I really like this mod. Good job and thank you for sharing.

Great mod, thank you - this will really help reduce spam.

I have 1 problem with it at the moment. When trying to ban a spammer, I get a 404 because (for security reasons) I changed the name of both modcp and admincp folders but your mod does not recognise this. As this is such a common situation, you really need to add those variables to the options page.

Sure! glad you like it. Don't forget to give the mod a rating and vote it for MOTM :)

I will put it on the list for possible enhancements if this is something that a lot of other people want. Though I think that if you ask around, the moving of those directories doesn't really do that much good and is more of a hassle than it is worth when dealing with administrative tasks such as mods and upgrades.

Ok, update ...

Still getting members placed in moderation and can't find a pattern as one had over 500 posts and the other just 2 posts. One thing in common was that they posted one (1) link in their post.

Settings in Spam-O-Matic as follows:

Auto-Moderation: URL Count = 0 (academic since according to previous instructions, the "Minimum Post Count" at 0 should turn OFF this function anyway)

Auto-Moderation: Minimum Post Count = 0

Akismet as handled by Spam-O-Matic was disabled ...

Vbulletin Akisment was left ON ....

So, before we un-install Spam-O-Matic and go back to vBStopForum mod which was working fine (even with vBulletin's Akismet running), we're going to turn vBulletin Akismet handling OFF completely and turn Spam-O-Matic Akismet handling ON, although checking every post of every user group is a waste of time most of the time (really needs that "above x posts not checked") function.

We've left the moderation settings at "0" and "0" ... hopefully disabled. ;)

Anyway, let's see what happens with this set-up, which is now mutually exclusive to the two Akismet handlers.

Thanks .. :)

Regards,
Badger

I also had the issue with legit members getting their posts put into moderation. We have had zero spammers make it to posting in 2 years with about 4400 members registered and a couple hundred thousand posts. Our big thing is catching them when they register and booting them before they do harm. That is why this mod rocks, it does a lot of the leg work for us.

We have a forum that is specific to a certain activity, so we added some mandatory fields in the registration that would be well known by people that would join up, but spammers just end up typing "test", "asdfg" or "Russia" or whatever. Combined with manually approving new registrations, this dropped our spammers to zero.

We disabled the checking of the posts in the forum because it is not really needed right now.

On a side note, we did find that a few years ago we had some spammers sign up and just start sending spam via private messages. We simply made it so new members with less than x posts cannot pm. once they hit the magic number the pms are turned on. When that first started, we found that we caught every spammer with the standard akismet anti-spam that came with vbulletin, and deleted them before they could do harm. This mod catches the spammers before we even have to deal with them. nice.

This is a nice mod.

I'm not talking about moving directories, I'm talking about the common practice of renaming them. This is supported as standard by vB. There is a setting in config.php that allows you to do this easily witout any upgrade hassle etc. It's a standard thing and this mod either needs to get the setting from the vB config file or if that's not possible, allow the admin to configure it on the options page. Any security conscious forum admin will do that as standard.

Extract from config.php:

Block Disabled:      (Update License Status)
Suspended or Unlicensed Members Cannot View Code.

Sorry, I was thinking of the Linux commandline when I said "Move" which is the Windows equivalent of "Rename." I usually work in Linux so I got your idea and was talking using Linux speak, sorry for confusing you.

As I said we have it on the list, based on if many others need this we will consider it. AFAIK this "renaming" is not very popular, but we will see.

OK. Can you give me a workaround in the meantime?

I found 2 instances of "modcp" in functions_vbghsfs.php on lines 290 and 534 and changed them to my own modcp name and although I no longer get a 404, neither the remove or ban actions will work. I get an uninformative message and when I click OK, nothing happens.

Attachment 120598

Unfortunately I can't give you any workarounds at this time as we are busy working on other more pressing areas in the current version like improving the logs and improving the Akismet functionality.

Once we are done in those areas we can probably spend some time looking at your request, but these were not part our original plans so it will take some research for me to be able to give you a workaround., well, one that works properly anyways.

If I find a workaround, I will probably just include it in a future release instead of in a random post in this thread which will be unlikely to be read or found.

Ok, another update ...

Still getting members placed in moderation and can't find a pattern as one had over 644 posts and the other just 8 posts. The 644 post member placed a post with one (1) link in their post while the 8 post member just mad a regular post with nothing obvious that would trigger it being placed in moderation. :confused:

Settings in Spam-O-Matic as follows:

Auto-Moderation: URL Count = 0 (academic since according to previous instructions, the "Minimum Post Count" at 0 should turn OFF this function anyway)

Auto-Moderation: Minimum Post Count = 0

Akismet as handled by Spam-O-Matic is ENABLED with ID.

Vbulletin Akisment handling was OFF ...

Not sure what to do next, but as much as we think that this mod has nice potential and its author is making efforts to sort it out, we're going to have to un-install Spam-O-Matic and go back to vBStopForum mod which was working fine, even with vBulletin's Akismet running concurrently.

Perhaps we'll try it later on when the "kinks" have been worked out ...

Thanks for everyone's efforts ... :)

Regards,
Badger