Prune users that are absuing the forum for backlinking.

[vadimr]

Looks like I have thousands of users on my forum that have a link in their signature and never have even posted once, they are using the backlinks from the member list. Is there a creative way to delete all these slackers?

[vadimr]

What I ended up doing is creating a new usergroup and running a few SQL statements to put all users with 0 posts and url in signature or visitor messages into that group and then just using the built in prune users tool to wipe them out:

UPDATE user SET usergroupid=14 WHERE posts = 0 and lastactivity < UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 MONTH)) and userid = ANY (SELECT userid FROM `usertextfield` WHERE `signature` LIKE'%url%')

UPDATE user SET usergroupid=14 WHERE posts = 0 and lastactivity < UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_SUB(NOW(), INTERVAL 1 MONTH)) and userid = ANY (SELECT userid FROM `visitormessage` WHERE `pagetext` LIKE'%url%')

[vadimr]

I also realized that some of these users were pretty creative and using the homepage field in their profile to get backlinks and actually post a reply somewhere with easy questions like "how come the link is not working, I cannot download", their signature would have something and so would their profile with the link to their garbage.

Here is a SQL query that finds these parasites:
update `user` set usergroupid=14 WHERE `lastactivity` - `joindate` < 86400 and `homepage` > "" and `homepage` != "http://" and posts = 0;


86400 means 24 hours (in seconds, look up epoch if need further information), so basically find anyone who's lastactivity and joindate are within 24 hours of each other, their homepage field is not blank and is not just "http://" (this was a default behavior of older vbulletin or something as I noticed many older profiles were not blank but had "http://")

I've deleted about 20,000 accounts from my forum just by running these queries. I also disabled BB URL in Signature and Visitor messages and disabled memberlist and leaving visitor messages to one self.

[vadimr]

So guess what? I disabled members list and I figured that is all I'll need to do. Nope, these SEO backlink scammers are still creating profiles. Took me a little while to figure out why, but they are doing it because of the calendar. Calendar has all the birthdays for all the members, so they usernames can be clicked on and they have their profiles with the URLs. I've again deleted 13,000 fake accounts using the above methods.

I strongly advise that people start removing these accounts, they are nothing but scummy people that charge legitimate website owners to "optimize" their search engine rankings by posting these messages.

Us, forum owners should fight to stop this junk from clogging up our own forums. Further this hurts our own search engine results as it makes the entire forum seem like a backlinking site to the entire world.

[tpearl5]

Thanks for the update - it sounds like there are a ton of bot registrations on your site. You should consider installing some kind of spam prevention system, especially one that tracks the time it takes for the register page for to be filled out and/or bad behavior.

[ozzy47]

Try the odd I described in this post, http://ozzmodz.com/showthread.php/506-The-Era-Of-Big-Spam-Is-Over