Ban countries module

Is there a module were you can close out some countries to enter phorum. I want to close my phorum for contries outside the EU so proxy's from china our russia can not be used any more.
Or is the a prxy ban module

there is no such module yet.
for now I'd say its up to you to find the corresponding ip addresses and block these through the regular banlists in phorum.

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Thomas Seifert

I'm all ready busy to fill my ban list, it's a long list at the moment. Still some spammer get through. On this moment i close one door en a other opens. I want to keep some people away from my forum, but the still get through by using a proxy programm under windows.

why not just using the spamhurdles module which is included in the distribution?

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Thomas Seifert

I use spamhurdles, this keep a way a lot of unwanted visitors. But there are same legal user who are wolfs in sheepclohting. For a time they act like normal user but after a while the edit there post and put spam ore other things in it. It's very dificult to stop this kind of actions.

I used to get spam every day on another site of mine, but then I learned about automated spam software and how it works. The simple effective solution was to remove the link from an activation email. Have the email send them their username and password in text, but do not put a link in that email. The software is designed to register a free webmail account, then register on your site with that email address (even overcome CAPTCHA), then check the email address for a registration email, and follow the activation link contained within it to log into your site. The software is designed to post "normal" posts maybe 5 times or however many times the spammer decides to set it to do, and then start spamming after that number has been reached. That entire process I just described is entirely automated. If you remove the activation link from your registration email, the software can't follow it, and the whole process is cut short. Since I made that change to my system, I have had no spam on my site for the last several months. However, my site generates a random password for a new user and requires them to change it after first log in. The only way they know their password is by reading their email. If you are letting them set their own password, the spam software will just sign in to your site as normal.

I wonder how just breaking the link with a "remove_this_string" would work? force some sort of human interaction to enable the link...

Like any anti-spam measure, it would work until the moment that somebody decides that your forum is interesting enough to target it by writing measure-circumventing code. IMO, doing something like that is breaking up the user experience in a bad way, but if the users are happy with it, I see no reason why not to add it. All bits help.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce