Stop vBulletin Spam Part II

Yesterday I discussed about how you can stop vBulletin spam using built in features of vBulletin. They provide very good options for preventing spam but when it comes to forums where people are not very techy, it can have many issues. I had hard time when using them on my MBA Forum which is for management students.

• When I had Captcha / reCaptcha it flooded me with emails complaining about the registration process.
• Moderation is tough as it’s a fairly active forum with lots of registrations daily.
• Email confirmation did not help much because many genuine users had issues understanding the email confirmation process. Things like this works fairly well on Go4Expert.com but not on MBAGuys.net
• I did not wanted to make the registration process over burden with one more field

So I was left with making something more custom and I came up with what I term is as spam blocker, where I do not allow certain content to be posted before user crosses some minimum post count and over time this has helped me not only prevent automated spam but also in stopping human spammers to an extent.

• Import spamblocker plug-in
• Login to your Admin CP and visit Admin CP > Plugins & Products > Manage Products
• Click on [Add/Import Product] and choose the xml file you downloaded and import it into your vBulletin.

Now Visit vBulletin Options > vBulletin Options > Spam Blocker By Shabbir Bhimani

And enter a value in Post count threshold which is the post count of user before which the spam rules should be applied.

To add new rules for spam

type:name:occurtimes:section:expression

type: Should always be regexp
name: Should be the unique name of the expression in the whole set of rules. If your name repeat the rules would not work.
occurtimes: What is the occur times you would like to trigger that as spam.
section: Where the test should be performed? Title, Body or on Both. Have it as any
expression: lastly the expression to test for.

Example

Let’s say you have a user who spams with hubpages blog and you want that hubpages URL’s should not be allowed even without clickable and to stop that add the following line at the end

regexp:a_hubpages:1:any:”/hubpages\.com/i”

Why do we need domains to be added when we do not allow urls anyway? The answer is human spammers who are clever not to link the url but spam with stuff like hubpages.com which is not clickable but they can link to the domain and if I see that kind of activity often I add that domain to my list of parser and now this new domain is not allowed to be posted by new registrant.

Now still user can still post like hubpages . com and so to stop that start banning such spammers and soon they will go away.

Credits

This is not my original creation from scratch but I downloaded some spam blocking script quite some time back for  vBulletin 3.0 but that was a bit different than my triggering and so I modified it. I could not find the original author of the plug-in ( as its almost 5 years now ) but if you are the author do let me know and I would provide the full credit.

Tagged as: CMS, Plugins, Spam, vBulletin

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