Spam bots defeat Recaptcha.

[SurfCityvBer]

I'm running a currently non-branded version of 3.65 that spent the first year of its 4-year life branded and I'm getting hit with just about every spammer registrant listed above. I simply banned the first few suspect registrants and one of them, lovebeijso, came in a few days later and somehow posted 5 spams in 3 minutes, so now I delete the registrants when I see them and ban the e-mail and IP; and block the user name in the registration options settings. I'm running Captcha and e-mail verification.

Another forum I run has been non-branded from day one (only about 3 months ago) and is running 3.6.8 PL2 and no problem with these particular culprits.


How about a system like SpamAssassin Rules where you can dynamically have vBulletin refer to a constantly-updated central database when each user registers?

[Steve Machol]

Banning by birthdate requires modifying the code. We cannot officially support code modifications or forums running modified code, however you can try searching or asking for help with this over at www.vbulletin.org.

[EcoForumZ]

To quickly find all spammers do this. To verify if they are a spammer do a search with there username on google. If they belong to thousands of forums that they are probably a spammer. You can further verify by reading threads they posted on the forums they belong to.

Admincp, users, search for users, add the following dates in the fields and hit find.

Birthday is After(yyyy-mm-dd) Enter = 1980-01-00
Birthday is Before(yyyy-mm-dd) Enter = 1980-01-02

So the question is how do we make it so users with January 1, 1980 as there birthdate need to be moderated or something like that? Can somebody create a scheduled task or use a plugin to search for users with that birthdate then perform a certain task on them?


My forum does not require users to add there date of birth but for some reason they all have the same birthdate. If this was a live person doing this why would they take the time to go into usercp and change there birthdate to exactly January 1, 1980? Lot's of sites require a birthdate to join so there software is adding it automatically. This is not a single human doing this they are using software to do this. These guys belong to thousands of forums within days.

Do a search for this new one usagirl19735 or this one that has been around for a while longer KaiyureBoy they are not doing this by themselves.

[copiertalk]

I have a branding free and they still find my site and spam it. It may be that amoung other search criteria. There are so many phrases uses over and over again on thousands of forums, it would be pretty easy to find vbull exclusive forums if desired.

[EcoForumZ]

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Would a small image with the exact same text help?

They are probably searching for "Powered by vBulletin" because they are doing this on multiple versions. One thing in common that they all do is use January 1, 1980 as the birth date.

Can we ban users with that birth date or something?

[NeitherSparky]

I wonder if upgrading to 3.7.1 would make difference.

That would be no.

We used to get MAYBE one spam account every other month or so. Today I upgraded from 3.6. to 3.7.1, and we've had 10 in about 4 hours. We're pretty annoyed. :P So, yay 3.7, lol...

[Marvin Hlavac]

I wonder if upgrading to 3.7.1 would make difference.

[FreewayOrange]

New one

Username: ultimatewarrior8888
IP address: 220.249.163.229
E-mail address: [email protected]


I'm currently getting over 40 spam posts a day at my board (3.7.0).

[Marvin Hlavac]

Looks like an excellent idea, but would that be lagal?

[Mile-O-Phile]

I was curious as to how easy it was to find out who was running vBulletin 3.7 so I did a Google search with the words "Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.7"... Yep, page after page after page of forums, including mine, came up. So for those wondering how they are finding out, it's not hard for them to find out who is on 3.7 at all. So vBulletin gets a lot of advertisement for free (that's just business of course) but there is a lighted path right back to all of us.'

Would a small image with the exact same text help?

[copiertalk]

We have been soft deleting the posts and banning the usernames.

We run a small community and have cought most of them prior to any spam.

[Vtec44]

They are spamming 3.6x as well.

They're spaming pretty much all forums, non-vB and vB. I'm on a few that have been hit by these guys.

[EcoForumZ]

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[EcoForumZ]

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[Steve Machol]

I'm afraid the answer was:

"There are as yet no confirmed and verifiable reports of this happening."

To clarify I am talking about Bots bypassing the registration and verification process. As long as you allow registration there is nothing to stop humans from registering and then turning over the account to a Bot.