Tag Archive for 'forum'

My #1 vBulletin Mod (can’t live without this one)

Published
by
J.B.Slife
on March 13, 2007
in Forums
. 2 Comments

The name of the mod is “NoSpam! (an alternative to CAPTCHA images)”. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a way to stop bots from automatically entering your site and posting a bunch of spam. Like most technology, it has some bugs.

What is wrong with CAPTCHA?

There are three main problems with CAPTCHA that I can see.

  1. Everyone hates it. Looking at those swirly images boggles the mind.
  2. If you turn your CAPTCHA strength up too high, then nobody can figure it out anyways. You won’t have any bots or spam on your site, but you won’t have any humans or real content either.
  3. There are now programs designed to read the CAPTCHA images. With these programs, you can automate the registration process and spam whoever you want as much as you want.

What does NoSpam! do?

Let’s take a quote from antialiasis (author of this hack) on vBulletin.org.

It asks a question. Any question you want. That’s the best part: YOU make up the questions, which means that every forum is unique, which means that it is impossible for spambots to be simply programmed to bypass it at all forums with the hack installed. You can make one or many questions - if you make many, the hack will pick one at random when a guest attempts to register, search, post or send mail through the Contact Us form. Their input is compared with your specified answer, and voilà , if they get it right they’re pretty much guaranteed to be human. If they get it wrong, they’re given an error message.

NoSpam! has worked wonders on my site, I could never go without it. I use very simple questions (commands) on my site. An example, “Please type JUMP into the following box.” Another example, “3 + 7 = ?”. As you can see, the questions can be very simple and you can have as many of them as you like. Since I added this to my site, I have had zero spam registries.

NoSpam! + CAPTCHA = Perfection

I should mention that I use this in combination with the CAPTCHA images. However, I keep the CAPTCHA images set at a moderate level so they won’t scare away my potential members. If you would like to know more about NoSpam!, click the link below.

Download NoSpam! at vBulletin.org