Cleantalk anti-spam addon

[ForestForTrees]

Does anyone have an experience with this? I couldn't find a single mention of it on xenforo.com, which I thought was weird.
https://cleantalk.org/xenforo-antispam-addon

It looks great to me. I'm getting pretty sick of profile page spammers. I had to delete 5 this morning.

 

[W1zzard]

Looks similar to my addon, just mine's free, with tons of config options and doesn't require their webservice which they probably just added to justify pricing.

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tpu-detect-and-block-spam-registrations.2973/

 

[ForestForTrees]

Your addon looks truly awesome. I definitely want to add it.

Their addon may be different because the webservice allows them to access a constantly updated centralized database and, possibly, a machine learning algorithm based on that database. It looks like it might be more similar to Akismet.

For example, I found out about cleantalk by googling the ISP of a spammer that hit me this morning. I found the following awesome page from Cleantalk, the addon we are discussing:
https://cleantalk.org/blacklists/AS55286

Apparently, those IP numbers have been used heavily by spammers recently. Because the info came from Cleantalk, their engineers can use the info to update their algorithms.

With that said, your addon rocks. I like that I could use it to customize my defenses for the specific spammers that are attacking my forum (i.e. their ISPs, GeoIP info, terms, etc.)

Personally, I'll probably go for Akismet because it's in the core and yours because it's configurable, but I was surprised that no one

 

[Paul B]

The fact that the add-on isn't listed in the Resources raises a bit of a red flag for me.

 

[W1zzard]

Apparently, those IP numbers have been used heavily by spammers recently.

You can score by AS number in my addon as well, the defaults cover most spammers, and manually adding new ones is easy, if you look at registrations that made it through (spam trigger log). I add like one AS once a month in our 3M posts forum. If you have entries to contribute, send me a PM anytime.

Akismet is for new posts (checks content), my addon works at registration time, so there is no content it could check. So you definitely want to use both.

 

[Xon]

I tend to use CleanTalk's website blacklist check when looking at stuff which isn't quite dodgy enough to reject but I'm still not sure about.

I found their checks more useful than the stock what-is-my-ip lookup took for determining if an IP or email address has been associated with spammers.

I have used their AS Number lookup, to blacklist ISPs with @W1zzard addon if the ISP looks particularly spammy.

The fact that the add-on isn't listed in the Resources raises a bit of a red flag for me.

Their plugin's source code is https://github.com/CleanTalk/xenforo-antispam

I don't agree with the class naming scheme, but overall it isn't that bad. It is however, clearly a wrapper around their existing php spamcheck addon.

 

[ForestForTrees]

The fact that the add-on isn't listed in the Resources raises a bit of a red flag for me.

How so? Someone has put an awful lot of money into that website, so I don't think that they are a fly-by night company.

 

[Kevin]

How so? Someone has put an awful lot of money into that website, so I don't think that they are a fly-by night company.

What exactly on that website infers "an awful lot of money" to you?

 

[ForestForTrees]

You're welcome to take a look at the site and draw your own conclusions. I'm not interested in debating website valuation with you. If you see it you do and if you don't, you don't.

 

[Kevin]

You're welcome to take a look at the site and draw your own conclusions. I'm not interested in debating website valuation with you. If you see it you do and if you don't, you don't.

I did look at the site, hence my question to you. You're the one who made the statement, I'm just trying to figure out what it was based on.

 

[ForestForTrees]

No worries, Kevin.

They appear to be a Russian firm, so a bit of skepticism is natural. On the other hand, I'm pretty happy with my Kaspersky Internet Security (though I wouldn't use it if I worked in the state department )

I found their plugin on WordPress.org:
https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/cleantalk-spam-protect
There are 340 reviews with an average of 4.8/5 stars. The changelog has some depth to it as well.

The most recent review, posted today by this guy says,

This is the best anti-spam service i have seen. $8 year or $16 year for 3 sites bests Akismet hands down. Their plugin for phpBB also solves a huge spam problem with forum spam.​

One never knows about reviews, of course, but I didn't notice any huge red flags.

I also looked them up on phpBB:
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/mod/rc_automoderation_and_spam_protect/support
The 16 reviews there seem to generally be pretty positive, but I didn't look deeply.

I'll probably stick with @W1zzard's plugin and Akismet, as they look awesome. However, if anyone does give this a try, I'd love to hear their thoughts. I really hate spammers.

 

[ForestForTrees]

The fact that the add-on isn't listed in the Resources raises a bit of a red flag for me.

How so?

I'd like to answer my own question, having come up with the answer while writing an unrelated post.

If a addon isn't listed in the Resource Manager, it means that it may have been developed in an unlicensed copy of XenForo. If a company can't be bothered to pay licensing fees like the rest of us, then how can we trust them with their data? Now I understand why having an addon not listed in Resources would be a bit of a red flag, so thank you for calling that to my attention.

I wish I had put two and two together earlier. Perhaps they are "fly-by-night" after all.

 

[ForestForTrees]

Hi all,

I'm happy to report that CleanTalk has been added to the Resource Manager here:
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/anti-spam-by-cleantalk.3975/

After making my last post, I went to the cleantalk.org forums and made a post in which sums up how I feel: "Takeup of your product among XenForo admins might be higher if you reached out to them by adding your product to their Resource Manager. You can only do this if you have a licensed copy of the software, but I certainly hope that your development copy is licensed. I suspect I speak for other XenForo admins when I say that if we can't trust you to pay the very inexpensive and reasonable licensing fees that the rest of us pay, then we will never trust you with our data. There are too many other great products out there."

I'm very glad to see their product listed here now. All's well that ends well, right?

In the meantime, I've installed TPU's two excellent addons and love them so far:
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tpu-detect-and-block-spam-registrations.2973/
https://xenforo.com/community/resources/tpu-detect-spam-registrations-javascript.2974/

They are highly configurable and are perfect for what I need right now. Perhaps sometime I will try CleanTalk as well. They might, indeed, complement one another, but I'd have to investigate that.