Restrict Ebay Linking to specific Usergroups?
 

A member of my team has suggested that restricting Ebay linking could have its benefits, mainly to defeat the scammers or roamers that post links to ebay in our For Sale section and never return, not adding anything but clutter to our forums.

Rather than banning it outright, could someone make a hack that would restrict Ebay links to members not in a specific usergroup or required to have xx posts, or similar?

Another twist to this, would have it be that a specific usergroup's posts in our "Marketplace" or "For Sale" sections would have a highlighted post.

have you thought about using forum perssions for that forum set to something like:
can view forum: yes
can view others threads: yes
can view thread content: yes
can post new threads: no
can post replies: no

this will allow them to view the forum as normal but not post in there at all until they reach the desired number of posts to be promoted to the usergroup that allows posting in that forum.

Cant do that.

Why?
Do you get errors?
Need additional permissions?
Don't want another usergroup?
Don't understand what I said?
Or something else?

You will find a little more detail (or in this case a lot more detail as you haven't given any clue as to what you mean) will go a long way in people helping you.

No sorry, I dont want to disable the rights to post for a usergroup.

My best solution would be my 2nd mentioned twist to the hack. Which would highlight Paid Members posts in our Marketplace forums.

It should be possible to do it that way, but it's not something that I'll be able to write up for you.

Just as a heads up though, if you don't want certain usergroups to post ebay links then the only way to stop it completely will be to prevent their posting in that forum. This is coz even if you just stop them from posting new threads then they will just hijack threads and put their ebay links in other threads which IMO completely defeats the object.

Anyone willing to do this hack?

It's fairly simple. Just add a plugin with an opening if statement to specify the "non ebay posting" usergroup. If a post or sig is found, it will be removed.

I'd do a preg_replace to replace ebay urls to redirect back to your own site, or just remove them entirely. You could also have it replace the ebay link with "Please do not post links to eBay until you have reached X posts).

It's also possible to catch these links before they post them, but I haven't messed around with those plugins personally.

Hope that puts you in the right direction. :)

I suggest you post at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/forumdisplay.php?f=30 as a service request if can't code.