Spam Stopper Module saw it’s first release on 9th September 2006 and was followed shortly after with v.2 on 16th September 2006.

Code Authors Spam Stopper module is designed to run with pnpNuke v7.6+ and all versions of Raven Nuke and certified to run on all versions of Raven Nuke and phpNuke 7.6.

Brief Outline of Operation
When your site gets a ‘hit’ from a visitor, this is usually because they have followed a link to it from elsewhere and thus, there is usually referer data in the hit.
Spam Blocker ‘pings’ the referring site and blocks it if it meets certain criteria.

This criteria includes;
1. Whether or not the page which the visitor came from returns a 403 (access denied)
2. Whether or not the page which the visitor came from returns a 404 (not found)
3. Whether or not your site URL was found on the referring page from where your visitor just came from.
4. Whether the referer string contains a word that is blocked in your ‘bad word’ list.
5. Whether the domain is already blacklist by Spam Stopper
6. Whether the referer is already banned on one of the other referer blacklists.
7. Whether a reverse look up of the domain agree’s with the IP it is coming from.

If a human visitor is accidentally marked as spam by Spam Stopper, they will still be allowed access to your site via a link provided by Spam Stoppers custom 403 (access denied) page and the falsely-marked referrer can be whitelisted.

Spam Stopper will use PHP’s CURL function if it is available on your server, otherwise it will use its own built in functions for efficiency.

Regarding point 5 above:
Spam Stopper is designed to connect to a number of third party blacklists such as Spamhuas and forwards the visiters referer or IP to see if it is blacklisted, if it is, thenSpam Stopper will instantly block access to the visitor from both the refering website and and the users IP.