Stop all bot based forum registrations. The Trap, Top Secret
I have created a highly secretive way to stop all bots from creating an account on my forums with only one single click required before the registration form is entered by the visitor. I wish to share my secret this with you to protect you, your users and your server from bot abuse.
Investigation determined that these bots are using exploits, random proxies, fake email accounts, low cost human labour, and more and more. I have stopped all this with a simple patch to the register.php vbulletin file.
My Story Fighting the Bots
I got tired of fake accounts getting created on my forums. I tried all the captcha options, made random questions to answer, tried a spam database service, nothing seemed to stop all the crazy automated sign ups from automated bots.When I tried captcha's it proved to be hard to read, preventing people from signing up, some try many times, but when the registration form comes back with input errors and a new captcha, they just give up. The bots continued to defeat these captchas, including using low cost human input to read and answer the captcha graphics.
Implementing a random questions and answer, the bots get through them, amazingly by known exploits in the forum software or using low cost human labour to answer.
Turning on email verification works well, but the bots can click the verification email links. I found dozens of sign up attempts with fake nonexistent email addresses daily and my members count keeps going up with non verified sign ups, creating a user record each time at an alarming rate.
Spam databases and IP address blocking are useless as all the bots use proxies, creating a large array of ip addresses to ban.
My attempts to ask a specific question, a thing only a person in my niche would know, worked great, but I had to put every account in moderation until I read their answer to the question. This resulted with dozens of fake account records put into moderation daily with a terrible delay and inconveniences to the user experience.
I gave up on public spam detection techniques. As I am a PHP programmer I figured I'll take on these spam bots. I logged all the web browser to server requests and responses for many days during the registration process, eliminating various versions and types of bots along the way. Very time consuming but fruitful in finding a method to defeat all of them and all new bots to arrive so far.
I have not had a single fake registration since I made this final spam bot trap. It's been at least of Dec 2016. I have eliminated 100% of the need for any captcha, any random question, moderation or any external services. I do still ask for the niche known answer and will continue to do so, but without putting the sign up into moderation to check. The forum software still verifies the sign up email before being approved but this step is unnecessary in most cases using my bot trap.
What to Expect Technical Information
You will be supplied a ioncube encoded file. You will be required to upload this file to your server and add two lines to register.php in vbulletin.
Please make sure you have the php ioncube encryption module installed on your php server.
The encoded php file contains the trap. It is encoded in an effort to keep the trap a secret and to protect the code from running on other servers in other domains.
The encoded php file does not make any file, database or off server modifications. It just contains my very simple trap.
It is recommended you name the encoded file something that can not be guessed.
The two lines of code in register.php in your vbulletin directory requires you to place a php include("encodedfile.php") near the top, after the vbulletin comments. encodedfile.php will be the name of your non guessable file mentioned above.
Buy Now Get the Trap Script
You can purchase a copy of the encoded trap php file including email and facebook messenger based support in implementing the script.
There is no demo or test site for the script. The idea is to keep it a secret.
I will never advertise or reveal an any site running the script to protect the script and I suggest you do the same.
There is no instant download as the script is encoded and tailored to your domain. The encoded file and brief instructions will be emailed to you.
Payment is made by paypal. Please include a note with your domain name when making payment.
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