Stop Forum Spam

[ITA003]

ALSO, I THINK THIS IS THE BEST MOD EVER AND SHOULD BE A STANDARD FEATURE, YOU KNOW HOW MANY TIMES THIS MOD HAS PROTECTED MY SITE !!!

Won't ever be a standard feature, firstly it relies on an external site and the team are very wary of doing that and secondly, it's incredibly easy to get yourself listed by accident, because there's no double checking - one of the former project managers here submitted his own IP address to see what happened, and there's no double checking to validate that it wasn't submitted falsely.

I'm looking for a solution about this... a possible solution can be to show (only if a spammer is detect) a tipical question to user like this:


write the fourth word of this phrase: "this is a example phrase"


The user must insert the word "example" to continue.


The advantage is that the question will be showed only if a spam was detected... what do you think?

@ITA003 Adding a new log is easy enough, just when you call the fatal_error or fatal_lang_error function, make sure to pass a different name through as the second parameter which would give it its own log category. Let me know if that doesn't make sense and I'll help with that.

Thanks! I'll take a look!

[Arantor]

The advantage is that the question will be showed only if a spam was detected... what do you think?

On SFS's side, or SMF's side?

[ITA003]

SMF's side

[Arantor]

Yeah, that can work if it's a suspected spam registration.

[desmo907]

   Now I wonder if the issue is NOT with this mod as I uninstalled it and then registered a test user and never got an email.   I also used the form to send another activation email and it never sent one.
  I did have SMF 1.1.11 and had updated to 1.1.13 and wonder if that is an issue....

-----------------------------------------   
I use this mod (on SMF 1.1.13) and set it to check for IP address only. I do not see an option to check for "email" but there is an option to check for "username" that I do not use.
    I also set the registration process to "Member Activation" so the user is supposed to get an email confirmation (a link to click to finish the registraton process) but they never do.  I have the option "send email to Admin when new user joins" checked as well but never receive any (maybe because I always have to manually activate new members).
 
  I am trying to figure out why members never get the email, as it always worked before before I installed this mod.  I know have to go and check the "Awaiting Members" area and activate those manually (which is a pain since I then check IP addresses manually).

This mod seems to work really well as it stopped ALL fake people from registering.

Thanks for any insights.

[mchaney]

I seem to have found a bug in 0.8.  A user, let's call him John Doe, tried to register on my forum but kept getting the "is a spam" message and being denied.  I searched John Doe on hxxp:stopforumspam.com [nonactive] and got zero results (his email and IP returned zero results too).  Now, when he tried again and used JohnDoe instead of John Doe, it worked.  This means that when you sign up with username John Doe, you get a false positive presumably because both "John" and "Doe" do give hits.  It looks like if your username has a space, a false positive is returned because it checks both names (before and after the space) individually and if either (or both) are there, you get a false positive.  Obviously if the user picks username "John Doe", it should only return a positive if "John Doe" is in the database... not either John or Doe separately.  I've turned off username checking because of this but I wonder if the bug exists with email also if you use a symbol in the email.

Regards,
Mike

[jrstark]

Is there any way to report spammers from the "Awaiting Approval" screen?  Also, is there any way to recheck multiple signups?  I leave suspected spammers waiting and recheck them, but can only do that by clicking on the magnifying glass.  It will also stay blue, even if the signup is now in the database, unless I have looked them up from the All Members page.

[ITA003]

I seem to have found a bug in 0.8.  A user, let's call him John Doe, tried to register on my forum but kept getting the "is a spam" message and being denied.  I searched John Doe on stopforumspam.com and got zero results (his email and IP returned zero results too).  Now, when he tried again and used JohnDoe instead of John Doe, it worked.  This means that when you sign up with username John Doe, you get a false positive presumably because both "John" and "Doe" do give hits.  It looks like if your username has a space, a false positive is returned because it checks both names (before and after the space) individually and if either (or both) are there, you get a false positive.  Obviously if the user picks username "John Doe", it should only return a positive if "John Doe" is in the database... not either John or Doe separately.  I've turned off username checking because of this but I wonder if the bug exists with email also if you use a symbol in the email.

Regards,
Mike

Do you have the "Check username" option enabled? If so, try to disable...

[allthumbz]

I am running version 2 RC5 and my users report that they are getting the following message:

"The user (Username) with Email (Email) (IP IPAddress) is a Spam, please contact forum administrator"

How can I prevent this please?

Thanks,


Nelson

[allthumbz]

I seem to have found a bug in 0.8.  A user, let's call him John Doe, tried to register on my forum but kept getting the "is a spam" message and being denied.  I searched John Doe on stopforumspam.com and got zero results (his email and IP returned zero results too).  Now, when he tried again and used JohnDoe instead of John Doe, it worked.  This means that when you sign up with username John Doe, you get a false positive presumably because both "John" and "Doe" do give hits.  It looks like if your username has a space, a false positive is returned because it checks both names (before and after the space) individually and if either (or both) are there, you get a false positive.  Obviously if the user picks username "John Doe", it should only return a positive if "John Doe" is in the database... not either John or Doe separately.  I've turned off username checking because of this but I wonder if the bug exists with email also if you use a symbol in the email.

Regards,
Mike

Am getting the SAME problem.

I just UNCHECKED this option.

Check also Username   (remove check mark here)
Enable check Username


We will see if it stops rejecting users with a space in their names.


Nelson

[rthrash]

New issue happened today when using the Report Member button on the Search Members page attempting to nuke a spammer. Every single users in the forum was set to needing to be approved by the admin. Repeated this twice and can confirm that's the triggering action. Manual query we used to fix:

Code Select Expand

update smf_members set is_activated = 1 where is_activated = 3;

The report action to the SFS website didn't actually occur.

Member ID is 37468 and IP address is 71.229.243.38 if that helps.

We are running SMF version 1.1.13 with a custom theme, and use the SFS mod daily to report and battle spammers. It's worked flawlessly for years before today.

[AMoon]

Thanks a ton - this appears to work pretty well for me so far!  I was really frustrated that I was getting over 100 spam registrations a day for a rather low key forum.  I tried to register an account with a StopForumSpam email address and it rejected it while it let me register with a 'real' account - success!!

Really, thanks a ton!

[ITA003]

New issue happened today when using the Report Member button on the Search Members page attempting to nuke a spammer. Every single users in the forum was set to needing to be approved by the admin.

This mods doesn't have the Report Member button... do you  use another similar mods?

[rthrash]

Doh it's the other one here. Sorry for the trouble: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1547

[Mayhem30]

You may want to change up the code a bit in your 'Who.template.php' file - your loading the "evidence.png" off their servers (which wastes their bandwidth and resources).

It appears they have disabled hotlinking - so all I'm getting now is a broken image box.

[ITA003]

Just update the package! 

[Mayhem30]

Thank you 

[glascor]

Hi I downloaded the file and it says The package you tried to upload either is not a valid package or has become corrupted.   is something wrong?

Thanks

[ITA003]

Try to download it again and let me know.

[GlitchPC]

I'm currently using this mod...and am not sure if it's working because I just installed it.  However, after looking at the following:

"The user (Username) with Email (Email) (IP IPAddress) is a Spam, please contact forum administrator"

I find that the mod should be updated using a grammatically correct version of the message a registrant receives if they are in StopForumSpam's database.  You should rewrite this mod so the message they receive is worded as such:

"The username, (Username), along with the email address (Email) and IP address (IPAddress) is being identified as a "spammer" through StopForumSpam.com's database.  If you feel this information is incorrect, please contact StopForumSpam."

Of course, you can add a link to StopForumSpam's contact page.

I don't believe they should contact the forum administrator, since we can't remove them from the database.  They should contact StopForumSpam and have them resolve the issue.  Once they have...then, by all means...they should re-register on your forum.