vBulletin Forum Owners - Blog Spam Remover

[Guard Dog]

I created an offshoot of a Spam Decimator for vBulletin. This tool will remove all posts, threads, and blogs as well as ban the user. It cross-checks IP addresses and will do the same for all other userid's with the same IP.

I created it because I had a forum that I just noticed was getting blog-spammed for months. It wasn't readily apparent because I don't ever look at the blogs, but it was apparent in my analytics software.


**WARNING**
Anyway - PM me if you want this tool. It requires manual intervention to realize which usergroups have blog spam. If you understand vBulletin you can write the correct query to remove ONLY the blog spammers you want to remove. If you do not, then it could remove ALL of your blog content.

 

[bonustreak]

Your the chit!!!

 

[Engineer]

Sounds like a useful tool. If I had any forums, I would be all over this!

 

[rak]

Has anyone else noticed that forum spam is getting out of hand? I'm on a few non gaming forums - and you see what looks like automated rubbish being posted every week on new and old old old threads. It's just getting tiresome to remove and report those users.

 

[Guard Dog]

Has anyone else noticed that forum spam is getting out of hand? I'm on a few non gaming forums - and you see what looks like automated rubbish being posted every week on new and old old old threads. It's just getting tiresome to remove and report those users.

It's getting really bad. But the worst is the *good* spammers. They are spamming blogs (like on a couple of my vBulletin forums) and even MORE covertly, they are spamming visitor messages and some of the lower-level vBulletin features. It really sucks.

It is also why I weekly get emails such as: 'Hey man! I am not a ******** spammer! Why is your system calling me one!!' I have a spam tool (GlowHost) on this system and I have it set to VERY pro-active. It means I likely lose a lot of forum members But the spam is minimal.

 

[Leo]

I have a vBulletin forum, but it has almost no members. Plenty of signups, but they're all spammers!

I have it set to require manual approval of all signups, and I always check the email address and IP address through the StopForumSpam system first before approving.

StopForumSpam catches over 90% of spammers, and the remaining 10% are usually fairly obvious through my visual inspection - eg. I have 'mailing address' as a required field, and for some reason most spammers write a Vietnamese address even though their IP indicates they're in Bulgaria or Ukraine or wherever. I have no idea why they think a Vietnamese address would look better than one from their own country!

In the vBulletin Phrase Manager I edited the template for the email that it sends to me whenever a new user signs up, so that it automatically gives me clickable links to check the details through StopForumSpam, like this:

StopForumSpam : Email
http://www.stopforumspam.com/search?q=$email

StopForumSpam : IP Address
http://www.stopforumspam.com/search?q=$ipaddress

There are also plugins that check StopForumSpam automatically before accepting new users, but they don't seem too reliable - eg. if for some reason it can't connect to the StopForumSpam server then it may block legitimate users. So I stick to manual approval which works fine for me, but I guess if you wanted to auto-approve new members you could just run them through StopForumSpam later after you get the email from vBulletin.

 

[Guard Dog]

Yeah, that is a good method. My method is more for spammers that have already come in through xrumer (or other spamming software) and put up massive amounts of posts. This wipes out all the crap they put in with one button click and bans the user. It's a nice tool

 

[Casinogamer.co.uk]

What doesnt help is that the Captchas have all been cracked including googles reCaptcha!

Have a look at xrumer and see why its so damn easy to spam on blogs / forums.

 

[Guard Dog]

Agreed... it's a killer. The problem is, what you DON'T see is more damaging than what you DO see. I only noticed due to analytics on a website where I found out blogs and visitor logs were being spammed by the smart spammers. No posts at all, but there in the deeper part of the forums where nobody looks.... there was tons of spam.