[TAC] Stop Country Spam

[TAC] Stop Country Spam [Paid] 3.1.5

No permission to buy ($19.00)
Overview Updates (33) Reviews (8) History Discussion
Hi :) We bought this awesome tool for a game-forum we are administrating.

The forum is connected to a horse game, www.myhorsefriends.com - released in Denmark 1 1/2 week ago - and we have some country restrictions for sign ups because of some legal rights. It is therefore very important to us, that we can block certain countries, which is why we found your to be perfect tool perfect.

However we noticed that girls from some of these countries managed to sign up anyway.

We also noticed that some from the countries not blocked could not sign up and got the 'blocked message' (including some girls from Denmark, which is the games main country).

I just tried it out on our test-forum - I am from Denmark. I used the exact same name/email both times.

First I Used the 'Black list' tag and checked the country "Denmark".
But I was still able to sign up all the way.

Then I used the 'White list' tag and unchecked Denmark.
Now it worked, and I could not sign up.

I am not sure if this is a bug, but to us it's very concerning, since it is so very important for us to block the correct countries.

What am I possibly doing wrong?

Thank you :)
 
I had a lot of spammers from other country's. So now i deployed Foolbothoneybot for the bots and stop country spam for humans. I disabled the first proxy setting such you described above. So i hope that that gives me a bit of rest :-) I let it run for a couple of days, and watch what happens so far its working great!
 
Lykke said:
Hi :) We bought this awesome tool for a game-forum we are administrating.

The forum is connected to a horse game, www.myhorsefriends.com - released in Denmark 1 1/2 week ago - and we have some country restrictions for sign ups because of some legal rights. It is therefore very important to us, that we can block certain countries, which is why we found your to be perfect tool perfect.

However we noticed that girls from some of these countries managed to sign up anyway.

We also noticed that some from the countries not blocked could not sign up and got the 'blocked message' (including some girls from Denmark, which is the games main country).

I just tried it out on our test-forum - I am from Denmark. I used the exact same name/email both times.

First I Used the 'Black list' tag and checked the country "Denmark".
But I was still able to sign up all the way.

Then I used the 'White list' tag and unchecked Denmark.
Now it worked, and I could not sign up.

I am not sure if this is a bug, but to us it's very concerning, since it is so very important for us to block the correct countries.

What am I possibly doing wrong?

Thank you :)
Click to expand...

The information as to why users are blocked or allowed will always be in the logs (admin.php?stopcountryspam/logs), can you check the logs, click on the relevant rows

If you only intend for your forum to be registered by users from Denmark, then if you are using the black list options, tick every country except Denmark (recommended)
If you use the white list options, just tick Denmark (however, rare situations occurs where IP's can't be mapped to a country, so white listing is not recommended)


If you still have registration issues, check the logs (admin.php?stopcountryspam/logs), click on the row and then refer to this post:

tenants said:
Have a look at your response, found here:
admin.php?stopcountryspam/logs
click on the row to see why you were blocked

2)
If Proxy Issues are found:

Clicking a row in the logs will tell you the exact reason a user is block (since this doesn't just stop countries but can be used to block proxies too), you can switch off all of the proxy options.

Some IPs and some host will always send proxy-like data in the headers (but this is not the norm). Once you know which one is preventing the registration, turn off that proxy check in your StopCountrySpam options
Click to expand...

There are ways that users might try to get around a country check (for instance proxies). But check your StopCountrySpam logs first to see what the users are doing
 
Last edited:
tenants said:
The information as to why users are blocked or allowed will always be in the logs (admin.php?stopcountryspam/logs), can you check the logs, click on the relevant rows

If you only intend for your forum to be registered by users from Denmark, then if you are using the black list options, tick every country except Denmark (recommended)
If you use the white list options, just tick Denmark (however, rare situations occurs where IP's can't be mapped to a country, so white listing is not recommended)


If you still have registration issues, check the logs (admin.php?stopcountryspam/logs), click on the row and then refer to this post:



There are ways that users might try to get around a country check (for instance proxies). But check your StopCountrySpam logs first to see what the users are doing
Click to expand...
Thank you :)

But were exactly do I find the log? If I go to 'Tools' -'Logs' - 'StopCountrySpam Log it's empty and says 'No errors have been logged.

I don't have any problems with spammers. Only humans being able to (or not being able to) sign up :/

Could it be a conflict with the default registration options?
 
That's correct,

Tools>>Logs>>StopCountrySpam Log

If there are no logs there, then StopCountrySpam hasn't blocked anything, it's quite possible it hasn't been set up.
(Which makes me wonder where the blocked message came from for your other users, since it wasn't from StopCountrySpam)

Have you set these in the StopCountrySpam options (Home >> Options >> Tac StopCountrySpam):
JSON Request
Index Name
(see this post for setting these values)

There will be no conflict with core methods, if that's what you mean by "default registration options", but if these options aren't set, the plugin is affectively "switched off"

If you are still having issues, you can send me a private conversations, and I can take a look at your settings for you
 
Last edited:
I think you should allow admin that has its own geoip.dat file on his own server, so no need to do external call to 3rd party website to get country information.
Of course updating geoip.dat will be the admin's responsibility, the plugin doesn't need to do that.
Please add it to the feature list and i am ready to buy :)
 
For anyone using this plugin with the Wipmania API, be aware that your signup page will currently not be loading.

Check out @tenants page here: http://www.surreyforum.co.uk/login/login

We installed this plugin about a month ago and got quite a few complaints that people say they cannot get the registration page to work - I hadn't put 2 and 2 together but now I realise this must have been a result of this plugin stalling the page load because the geoip lookup took so long / was so unreliable.

I wouldn't recommend this plugin - the rest of tenant's spam plugins are indispensable (especially Foolbot Honey Pot), but this one needs to be implemented differently. Show the registration page and let the user register as normal - but after registration put the user in a special usergroup and do some post processing on him to check the registration IP. This way it will not effect the user experience and prevent anyone being able to register on your site when the API is down.
 
this error getting annoying i have about 3 pages full of these

Code: 
Server Error Log
Error Info
ErrorException: Undefined variable: jsonResponse - library/Tac/StopCountrySpam/ControllerPublic/Register.php:427
Generated By: Unknown Account, Today at 11:25 AM
Stack Trace

#0 /home/unkn0wn/public_html/forums/library/Tac/StopCountrySpam/ControllerPublic/Register.php(427): XenForo_Application::handlePhpError(8, 'Undefined varia...', '/home/unkn0wn/p...', 427, Array)
#1 /home/unkn0wn/public_html/forums/library/XenForo/FrontController.php(347): Tac_StopCountrySpam_ControllerPublic_Register->actionRegister()
#2 /home/unkn0wn/public_html/forums/library/XenForo/FrontController.php(134): XenForo_FrontController->dispatch(Object(XenForo_RouteMatch))
#3 /home/unkn0wn/public_html/forums/index.php(13): XenForo_FrontController->run()
#4 {main}

Request State

array(3) {
  ["url"] => string(49) "http://portalcentric.net/forums/register/register"
  ["_GET"] => array(0) {
  }
  ["_POST"] => array(0) {
  }
}
 
This add-on has seriously helped on a few forums. Check out the frequency of rejection. I have whitelisted only a few countries where legitimate members would come from.

Screen Shot 2014-05-21 at 3.25.01 AM.webp
 
Would it be possible to change the check upon clicking on the Sign Up button? Ive tried a few providers and the time to validate the country takes 5-10 seconds. This penalizes legit users.
 
Ive tied three and they all take 10 seconds. If I try registering again after a few minutes, its quick. Ive tried with my desktop and mobile phone and get the same behavior.
 
0ptima said:
Ive tied three and they all take 10 seconds. If I try registering again after a few minutes, its quick. Ive tried with my desktop and mobile phone and get the same behavior.
Click to expand...

Okay stopproxies is and was down... untick the option "Enable StopProxies". The site is timing out, we need to check the stopbotters api now anyway.
I haven't updated stopcoutryspam in a while (and not looked at it), but unticking the stopproxies option should solve this (I will switch the option for stopbotters next release, and looking at this now)
 
tenants said:
Okay stopproxies is and was down... untick the option "Enable StopProxies". The site is timing out, we need to check the stopbotters api now anyway.
I haven't updated stopcoutryspam in a while (and not looked at it), but unticking the stopproxies option should solve this (I will switch the option for stopbotters next release, and looking at this now)
Click to expand...


That did it!
 
Yeah, the annoying thing about an API timing out, is that there is no way to stop the connection early in PHP

If a site is down, it's not an issue, the response is immediate (and we can easily deal with it / bypass it), but if a request is very slow / times out, there is very little that can be done in PHP. Which makes me think about tweaking the design of this a bit and having the API requests as a jquery background request (rather than before the page loads), and then even time outs wont really affect real human users.

This is what I do with other Addon API requests, so I might re-arrange stopcountryspam to do the same

Most of the time there will never be an issue (even if the site is down), but timing out sites will currently do the above.
 
That would be nice. The last thing we want is to deter visitors due to a slow loading registration page.
 
Is anyone running this on 1.4.x?

I'm getting fed up with Vietnam & Pakistan based human spammers at the moment. I already have a license, just never installed it.
 
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