-
OzzModz is no longer taking registrations. All registrations are being redirected to Snog's Site
All addons and support is available there now.
The Era Of Big Spam Is Over.
- Thread starter Ozzy47
- Start date
Well, I had to increase my timer to 45 seconds. I started to get about 10spammers a day. This is still a big change from before I had the timer mod. I guess I will also have to rename my register.php file once again as my logs show the new file name now being hammered versus register.php. Also, the mod to block the search engines is working great.
I know this came up earlier in this thread but, why does nobody want to do a mod to block tld,s such as .ru and.cn?
Thanks,
John
I know this came up earlier in this thread but, why does nobody want to do a mod to block tld,s such as .ru and.cn?
Thanks,
John
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
This is happening with ALL of the tools listed in the OP, installed and defined with the lists? Would be the first time I have seen that happen.
Yes I am using ALL the mods and the lists. When I go into my cPanel and check my logs I used to see my register.php file was being hammered. I now no longer see any to the reference to register.php only to the new name I changed it too. I am going to change it again and see if their is a pattern.
As to the timer, I changed it to 45 seconds and only had to people register today. I know they are all scammers because I have not setup the site yet and only have two posts I setup as a test. The mods have made a big difference as I was getting signups all day long before ans lots of spam posts.
Since I installed the mods I have only had two spam posts and none since I changed the timer to 45 seconds. I do not have the button appear until after the timer expires. I wonder if I should disable this feature and see if it makes a difference. Any thoughts on this?
John
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
I never tip the spammers by having the countdown visible, the button not able to be clicked until the time expires.
If any spam account is registering successfully, it is a human spammer not a bot. I recommend making the timer 25 seconds to catch bots only, and disable the countdown feature.
Also, you should get the user agent, hostname and IP of these successful registrations and post them here, to help further populate the ban lists for the two mods we recommend, which use those lists. Do you have those lists installed in those mods correctly? I have seen people not do this part right, many times.
If you don't mind PM'ing me a account with admin credentials I can take a look and see if everything is set up correctly - you should have ZERO spam using these procedures.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
I sent you a couple of replies of some things I noticed.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
Always happy to help.
If you share information here such as user agent strings, hostnames and IP addresses of spammers who make it through we can further improve this moat.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
Here's a new hostname to add to the "Prevent Hostname or User Agent from registering" list:
HTML:
shoutca.stOut of curiosity, I've been using Spam Hammer and it seems to do a great job of stopping bots from registering. I was wondering if Spambot Stopper does an even better job? I've been getting at least 5 or 6 bots stopped from registering per day lately so it's doing a good job.
I tried but have de-activated Glow Spamomatic as it was causing me problems. They might have been related to another mod or hack but deactivating Glow solved it and Spam Hammer is doing a good job blocking the bots so I've just gone in that direction instead.
Another host that I would add to the list is 'vpn999'. I have been getting an influx of bots lately from that host among others. All seem to be using iPhones, according to the user agent anyways, which I find to be a bit strange. There are times when I have 8 or 10 bots trying to register or just on various parts of my site connecting from various vpn999 server nodes all with the same user agent - Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Versi .
But whatever the case, none of them are able to register or manage to post, so all it does is boost my who's on-line stats.
EDIT: By the way...thanks for linking to this thread in your sig over at vbulletin.org, Max!
I tried but have de-activated Glow Spamomatic as it was causing me problems. They might have been related to another mod or hack but deactivating Glow solved it and Spam Hammer is doing a good job blocking the bots so I've just gone in that direction instead.
Another host that I would add to the list is 'vpn999'. I have been getting an influx of bots lately from that host among others. All seem to be using iPhones, according to the user agent anyways, which I find to be a bit strange. There are times when I have 8 or 10 bots trying to register or just on various parts of my site connecting from various vpn999 server nodes all with the same user agent - Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Versi .
But whatever the case, none of them are able to register or manage to post, so all it does is boost my who's on-line stats.
EDIT: By the way...thanks for linking to this thread in your sig over at vbulletin.org, Max!
Last edited:
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
On my own sites which both run v3.8.7 I use the original "Spam Hammer" I paid to have coded for me, then allowed release to the vBorg community. It's undergone many, many changes since then, none of which I needed. Original version 1 still works just fine for me and there is nothing wrong with it.
Ozzy and I however recommend "Spambot Stopper." If you use "hammer" and like it there is no reason to change, as it is also compatible with the other modifications listed in the OP and there are no conflicts..
Hi, i found this thread via a link posted on vbulletin.org by Ozzy. We've been having a few spambot issues recently and had thought about installing a fancy captcha....... so very glad i was redirected here! Installed all the plugins last night, fingers crossed it does the job for us Anyway, just wanted to post and say thank you - nice to know there are still some helpful people around the net! Cheers, Goof.
Anyway, just wanted to post and say thank you - nice to know there are still some helpful people around the net! Cheers, Goof.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
Glad to hear you found this. Keep in mind that two of these modifications do nothing at all without the lists installed on them.Hi, i found this thread via a link posted on vbulletin.org by Ozzy. We've been having a few spambot issues recently and had thought about installing a fancy captcha....... so very glad i was redirected here! Installed all the plugins last night, fingers crossed it does the job for us
Yep, i've downloaded and added the lists from Ozzy's zip file mate, as instructed - cheers!
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
Another hostname for the hostname list:
HTML:
xnet.hrHey guys, I was sent here from a thread that discussed the closing of spam hammer. The premium version of Spam Hammer was working very well for me on a REALLY large forum, but I wasn't comfortable relying on something that now has nobody standing behind it, so I decided to give all of these add ons a try. While they haven't worked as well as Spam Hammer (I've had 6 or 7 spam registrations since installing yesterday afternoon), they are performing pretty well.
I'm beginning to think there is no way to have ZERO spam.
I'm beginning to think there is no way to have ZERO spam.
Max Taxable
The Wyatt Earp of Anti-Spam
"Ban Spiders" and "Prevent Hostname and user agent from registering" do nothing without the definitions lists provided. "Rename register.php" isn't worth a crap at all, if you use the word 'register' or any variation of it, in your new name for the file. That totally defeats the purpose of that mod.
Any spammer who gets through "Spambot Stopper" would assuredly have gotten through "Spam Hammer." Neither are designed to stop human spammers and neither works all that well against bots if you have the timer setting too low. I recommend 25 seconds as a starting point, and only ever go up - not down - as adjustment. Lower timer numbers just help the spammers since the timer mod relies on pageload speeds - and a good many of the botnet admins use terrible proxies.
I am the person who originally paid to have "Spam Hammer" coded and I stopped recommending it long ago - due to the demonstrated instability of the coder of it, and due to his addition of some 'features' that are self defeating, such as the visible countdown timer before clicking 'submit' and the 'gotcha' messages to spammers upon rejection.. Both of these should be disabled unless you simply enjoy tipping off spammer botnet admins that you're using a timer.
The occasional human spammer CAN rarely get through, it's the nature of the web. But we have a answer for that as well, in development. Our attitude about this is militant - we DO believe all spam can and will be stopped. We don't start out, thinking it can't be done and therefore we must compromise. That's defeatist. It CAN be done and yes it HAS been done. My own sites, and five others I have personally secured for others, get NO spam despite 1000s of documented attempts.
So, on using the mods recommended in the OP here, please make sure that:
- "Register.php" has nothing in it that contains the word, 'register' or any variation of it. You'd be surprised how often I see this.
- "Ban spiders by user agent" contains the definitions list provided here
- "Prevent hostname and user agent from registering" contains the definitions list provided here
- "Spambot stopper" has 25 seconds as the timer setting, and also has the 'gotcha' and the visible countdown timer, disabled.
These Mods are only as good as the settings, like most everything else.