member overview page being used for linkfarming

[kjkoster]

Dear All,

Recently I have discovered an insidious form of vbulletin-based spamming on my forum. I have a habit of banning spammers permanently, but leaving their accounts so they cannot reuse the e-mail addresses.

During registration, they set their home pages and signatures to point to the spamvertised sites. Unwittingly, I have been linking to their petty little enterprises for months.

Use this SQL statements to find these:

select userid, username, homepage, usergroupid from user where usergroupid=8 and homepage <> '';
select user.userid, user.username, sigparsed.signatureparsed from user, sigparsed where user.userid=sigparsed.userid and user.usergroupid=8;

What are you guys doing to solve this? Do you also leave the user accounts?

Kees Jan