Visual Confirmation

I would like to have Visual Confirmation as an option on the registration form to prevent robots from registering and placing ads.  Since I added it to my phpbb forums registering by robots has totally stopped.

I am getting several "penpal" ads a day on my classifieds, all from the same person.  Multiple geocities site, multiple Yahoo addresses and multiple IPs. 

mgravlee,

I suspect those penpal / geocities personal ads are coming from Romania.  I can't remember what the IP address ranges are but if you do a whois (it will probably take you to RIPE whois) on the IP to back into the ISP that they are using you can block the entire range using .htaccess "deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/yy " - note the IP address needs to be in CIDR format - here's a tool that will calculate it for you - http://www-networks.its.unimelb.edu.au/network_ranges.cgi  .

Just make sure the range is from Romania and not AOL U.S.   

I've also seen a lot of email harverters from Romania and I've blocked them using the same process.

I'm working on a misbehaving spider / email harverter block that runs unattended and is dynamic.  As soon as I've got it in production I'll post it here for use.

Take care,

-jay

Well, duhhhh.  I assumed that with US addresses and websites they were using a US Yahoo IP connection. 

The RIPE IP range is now blocked.  Thanks for the tip.

One more question.  How do you block this Nigerian scammer:
 IP: 1.1 proxy:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE4) (for 192.168.0.25))

Be careful. . . Esvon is in the RIPE address space as are Colin, and Charles and some others that you may need assistance from

Can you pull the IP address of the proxy server out of your log files?  It's there you just have to dig for it.

-jay

Visual confirmation has been available since ver 3.0.797 or thereabouts and ver.4 has it on all forms you can think of, so closing this thread,