Thomas,
SFS = stopforumspam . com
I've been using this module for a while, and it works very well as far as it goes.
--I am on a server that lets me use .htaccess and I tested banning ips, cutting and pasting. A couple of weeks of that and it got old (about a thousand ips).
---My next test was with the Phorum ban list. I downloaded from SFS a 7 day list of bad ips (21925 ips), imported it into the Phorum ban list and let it cook for a few days. Performance hit was minimal, but it didn't check/stop those that attempt to use the login page.
I was working on a list of things I wanted to see added to Phorum or its modules related to SFS.
...Every user ip should be checked at login with SFS, and blocked if it is a spam ip.
...One button click to add an ip to the ban list or .htaccess from the event logger.
... ...ban list needs paging with 20,000 entries.
... ...ban list not optimized for ips, no index on string varchar field
... ...not practical to delete 20,000 ban list items one at a time in Phorum
...Ip group by count in the event logger (fast way to find the ips that have the most entries, regardless of "Source")
...Add the SFS info to the moderators user approval page, and your Block User module.
Doing some research at SFS I read quite a bit in their forums. There I ran across a reference to zbblock located here--> spambotsecurity . com. Zbblock does more than query the stopforumspam database, and it will handle other types of attacks besides spam, but only for .php pages. It keeps and builds a local cache of bad ips, lowering the need to query the SFS database.
---I downloaded and installed zbblock (painless addition to common.php on the first line), disabled the stop forum spam module, cleared the event log. I will try this for a few days, but so far there are no entries in my event log.
