How to Stop vBulletin Spam Registration

Discussion in 'Content Management System' started by shabbir, Apr 9, 2013.

  1. shabbir

    shabbir Administrator Staff Member

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    Captcha, reCaptcha as well as Question and Answer does not stop vBulletin Spam registrations and so I have come up with yet another solution to stop vBulletin Spam for Registration. This works with any kind of site and is based on Cookies for Comments Wordpress Plugin.

    The idea and implementation is completely based on the plugin and so the credit completely goes to the Authors of the above plugin. I have just used it for vBulletin and shared it here so you can apply the same for your forums. It is very simple and yet so effective that it can be applied to almost any website.

    Step 1



    Download the above plugin and extract into a folder. Upload css.php file to your forum root directory. Browse to the css.php file in your browser and copy the link to the css.php file.

    Step 2



    Now add the following lines to your headinclude template in each of your vBulletin style.

    Code:
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="LINK_TO_FILE UPLOADED_IN_STEP1?k=SOME_RANDOM_STRING_OF_YOUR_CHOICE" />
    Replace the SOME_RANDOM_STRING_OF_YOUR_CHOICE with anything of your choice.

    If you don't want to add stylesheet declaration in your template, you can also opt for blank image. For this you have to upload the blank.gif image from the above plugin to your site and then add the following blank image code in header or footer template of each of your vBulletin style.

    Code:
    <img src="LINK_TO_FILE UPLOADED_IN_STEP1?k=SOME_RANDOM_STRING_OF_YOUR_CHOICE&o=img" width="0" height="0" border="0" style="display:none;" />

    Step 3



    Now Add the following into your .htaccess file.

    Code:
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*SOME_RANDOM_STRING_OF_YOUR_CHOICE.*$
    RewriteRule ^register.php - [F,L]
    Remember the above rules goes right at the top. Even above the vBSEO Rules if any.

    Now any user visiting your register.php file without visiting any of your pages on your forum will get a 403 forbidden error message.

    There can be issues if you have multiple CMSes like may be Wordpress and vBulletin or any other static pages and genuine users can click on registration link from those pages. The solution is to make the call to the above CSS/image file from every page of your site.

    I hope it helps reduce the spam registration considerably.

    The above solution can even be applied to any other custom CMS of your choice as well. You have to just block your registration pages with the needed cookie and set the cookies in header or footer of your site for genuine users who visit your site.

    Further Spam Prevention Options for vBulletin



    You can also opt for some more spam prevention options that I have mentioned on my blog here as well as opt for a Block vBulletin Spam Posts Plugin to stop spam posts in forums.
     
    coderzone and david_BS like this.

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