Reporting spammers manually doesn't work

Hi,

spambot.module can only report a spammer to www.stopforumspam.com if there is an IP address associated with the user account. This is a requirement imposed by www.stopforumspam.com, not spambot.module itself.

If the user account has never logged in, there is no IP address yet, so reporting fails.

If you visit the 'Spam' tab of a user account, the 'IP Addresses' fieldset informs you whether there are IP addresses which can be used for reporting the account. If there are no IP addresses, reporting will fail.

For such cases, you could try looking in the Drupal logs for the logged event corresponding to the user registration to find the IP address used to register, and report the spammer yourself.

Hi,

> Drupal has a logged event for the user registration, so couldn't
> spambot access the logs and obtain the ip address from there?

Yes, there is a logged event, but this doesn't verify yet that the ip address is associated with the registered email address. Only when a user account logs in, is there evidence to link the ip address with the email address.

Otherwise, if a user or spambot registers using any (unverifiable) email address which it doesn't have control over, then you'll get a false positive.

I understand your position here, because when I manually check not-logged-in-before accounts, I have to manually search the event logs and report on www.stopforumspam.com by hand too.

If there was a method which is sufficiently robust (and unlikely to result in false positives), then I'd be happy to implement it, but I can't think of a better approach presently.

(Also, the event log expires after a period of time, so it doesn't keep IP address information for registrations forever).

> you should report a message back to the user saying that no IP is recorded,
> the user was not reported, and to do it manually at www.stopforumspam.com

Well, actually, if an account has not been logged into with before, and there is no associated IP address, the checkbox 'Report this account to www.stopforumspam.com as a spammer' should actually be greyed out and disabled. I'm not sure why you are able to attempt a report without an IP address being available. By design, you shouldn't be able to do this, so there is something I don't understand going on.

Marking as postponed. While the issue still exists, it's not clear what the fix is, if any.

With the release of spambot.module 6.x-3.3 and 7.x-1.2, and a change in www.stopforumspam.com policy that requires reporting to provide evidence, this issue is out of date and doesn't make sense anymore.