#1 2016-05-15 3:52 am

zX-Web22

Member

Registered: 2016-05-15

Posts: 4

Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

Hello,
In the last 24 hours or so, one 1 of my forums registrations have been denied.

I reviewed the logs, and tested registering myself, it's displaying this message:

Registration denied. We check new registrations against a database of known forum spammers. At this time, we are unable to contact this database to verify your registration. We are sorry for the inconvenience but please do try again later.

Thank you

NeoFox

Member

From: WI, USA, Earth

Registered: 2013-09-26

Posts: 830

Website

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

Hello,
In the last 24 hours or so, one 1 of my forums registrations have been denied.

I reviewed the logs, and tested registering myself, it's displaying this message:

Registration denied. We check new registrations against a database of known forum spammers. At this time, we are unable to contact this database to verify your registration. We are sorry for the inconvenience but please do try again later.

Thank you

They tried to DDOS (<-- wikipedia link) us. If you still have all the pertinent information you can resend now. The dust's settled.

Last edited by NeoFox (2016-05-15 4:48 am)

zX-Web22

Member

Registered: 2016-05-15

Posts: 4

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

Would it affect the plugin installation? Because I uninstalled it in an effort to try to resolve the issue, and each time I try to re-install it now, it just gives a database crashed error. Unfortunately I don't know the exact error since we modified the error page to a custom one.

But I tested with installing other plugins, it works just fine. It's only the stopforumspam that won't work.

zX-Web22

Member

Registered: 2016-05-15

Posts: 4

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

I got it installed again, but still getting the error:

Registration denied. We check new registrations against a database of known forum spammers. At this time, we are unable to contact this database to verify your registration. We are sorry for the inconvenience but please do try again later.

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,055

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

Can you PM me your forum details please?

masterwolf

Member

From: 123 North Antarctica

Registered: 2012-01-21

Posts: 54

Website

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

Same here.

May 14 17:58:07 CDT, Successful lookup
May 14 18:33:15 CDT, No access. Getting 503 error codes since then.

Using  the same API code as my server I can do manual lookups from Firefox. However if I try it from my server using php, wget, lynx, I get: Error 503. 0 rate limit exceeded. If I try running the same code from the php server on my computer I am successful.

So it seems to be IP based. VPS are blocked but ISP customers are not?

Test code

<?php
$r = file_get_contents("http://stopforumspam.com/api?email=<REMOVED>&username=<REMOVED>&ip=<REMOVED>&f=xmldom");
print_r($r);
?>

Result from VPS:

NOTICE: PHP message: PHP Warning:  file_get_contents(http://...@mail.ru&username=<REMVOED>&ip=<REMOVED>&f=xmldom): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 503

Result from local php:

<root>
  <success>1</success>
  <email>
    <lastseen>2016-05-15 11:37:41</lastseen>
    <frequency>23</frequency>
    <appears>1</appears>
    <confidence>81.79</confidence>
  </email>
  <username>
    <lastseen>2015-09-12 04:23:07</lastseen>
    <frequency>2</frequency>
    <appears>1</appears>
    <confidence>0.05</confidence>
  </username>
  <ip>
    <lastseen>2016-05-15 18:02:00</lastseen>
    <frequency>179</frequency>
    <appears>1</appears>
    <confidence>97.22</confidence>
  </ip>
</root>

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,055

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

Nothing is blocked but if you PM me your forum details then I can look at what's going on.

I've just flushed all the counters for all forums so as of right now everyone has performed 0 queries in the last 24 hours

if you query api?get=rate then it will show you how many queries your IP has name in the last 24 hours (well, 86400 seconds, which is the TTL on the cache object)

masterwolf

Member

From: 123 North Antarctica

Registered: 2012-01-21

Posts: 54

Website

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

Its working now. I only had 12 queries yesterday before getting blocked. I'll send more in pm.

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,055

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

I'll check the proxy configuration as it might not have been getting the correct forward headers.

pedigree

uıɐbɐ ʎɐqǝ ɯoɹɟ pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ buıʎnq ɹǝʌǝu ɯ,ı

From: New Zealand

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 7,055

Re: Last 24 hours or so, registrations denied

This appears to have happened when clients connected to Cloudflare with IPv6 which resulted in all IPv6 clients being bundled into the same rate limiter.  I'll get this fixed.