Something I’ve noticed.

When I originally wrote the FSpamlist database program, I was originally writing it for phpBB. Looking around in phpBB’s ban list options, I noticed it said this:

To specify more than one email address, separate them with commas. To specify a wildcard username, use * like *@hotmail.com

Now I automatically assumed that ALL wildcard (*) locations would work. So, if I wanted to have a wildcard after the @ symbol I could. For example, if I wanted to ban every single e-mail from the .ru domain, I would add *@*.ru to the ban list. That should work right? Well I went to phpBB.com to investigate. Once I was there I noticed that someone had come up with a ban list update that WOULD allow you to use multiple wildcards in your ban list. Here is the description:

Upgrades the ability to use wilcards in banning email adresses by allowing the banning of entire groups of domains. For isnstance, just adding *@yahoo.* to the ban list, will ban email addresses at all of yahoo’s many international email domains, such as yahoo.com, yahoo.co.uk, yahoo.de, etc.

But reading further in the forum, I can see that this mod didn’t work all the time. But towards the end of the thread, I noticed that one person said that he/she installed it on 2.0.22 and it worked perfectly..

So, I am pretty sure that a modification is needed to make the 10 spammers that are currently in the database with the *@* wildcard method to work. I am not sure there is a definite solution yet. If you want to check the thread over @ phpbb, follow this link:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=160638