Yeah I thought it was rather ingenious...As soon as I did some searching on the vbulletin forums about spam blocking...I found out that vBulletin NATIVELY supports reCaptcha...I went ahead and signed up...and sure enough it worked.
Yeah I thought it was rather ingenious...As soon as I did some searching on the vbulletin forums about spam blocking...I found out that vBulletin NATIVELY supports reCaptcha...I went ahead and signed up...and sure enough it worked.
All Hail FlappyMap! Long Live MapFeed!
Robbie Powell - Site Admin
I just read...I think the spammer is using a script that tries all the accounts in the memberlist and tries to log in using the same password as their username.
Which basically means...if a user stupidly made their password the same as their username, it will eventually be found by this bot. I'm going to see if I can find code that will tell me what users on the site have done this...
So...if your password is the same as your username...change it now, or I may change it for you.
All Hail FlappyMap! Long Live MapFeed!
Robbie Powell - Site Admin
There's a BUNCH of spam PMs from a BUNCH of users...I think they're compromised accounts...
I have turned off private messaging temporarily. If all goes well private messaging will return tomorrow or Monday...but I'm not comfortable turning it back on until the spam problem is solved.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
All Hail FlappyMap! Long Live MapFeed!
Robbie Powell - Site Admin
Let me know if there is anything I can do script wise to help out. I use one to grab errors from the error log and format up htaccess entries which get tacked on. Ok it bins some legit attempts to join that screwed up but it culls the spam bots severely.
Good luck, Robbie.
Spammers are a pain in the butt. On my home site blog I ended up having to block trackbacks at the firewall, not because they were getting them through (very good spam prevention in the blog software I use), but because the spam catching/processing was killing by CPU
-Rob A>
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Thanks to a nice healthy discussion on the vbulletin forums I think I got it under control. All the affected users were banned and I've deleted all their sent pms.
I've also set up a new permission system that I'll be turning on momentarily.
Whats going to happen is that all the Registered Users on the site with more than 5 posts will be promoted to the Guild Members group.
These two groups are identical except for the fact that registered users cannot send private messages.
If there ever happens to be any other forms of spam such as spam posts, then I'll make their first 5 posts require moderator approval before they appear on the site. This is definitely going to help cull the problem...BUT, there may be some minor permissions issues that pop up...and if anyone sees anything wrong, please PM me when PMS are turned back on.
Thank you all for your patience, and again I apologize for the inconvenience.
Redrobes...thanks for the offer for assistance. There's a php script that was posted to the vbulletin forum that searches the user base and randomly changes all the passwords of users who's passwords = username...but I'd like to modify it to only create a list of said users instead of randomly assigning their password. Know enoough about php to help me with that? If not, I'll try to work through it...but its lower priority at the moment since I seem to have it under control.
All Hail FlappyMap! Long Live MapFeed!
Robbie Powell - Site Admin