Lot of new members... no new posts.. problem?

[fdifranco]

Hi,

I have chosen to take a different route with spammers. I let all of the spammers register.

When they post spam, I simply ban them (vB makes it pretty easy to ban multiple users with the thread tools). Once they are banned, I have a widget (on a page with admin-only security) that let's me change all of the usernames of the banned users to different names.

An example is that I had a spammer with the username 'liexbesyDeele'. After I ran my 'Spam Buster' widget the name gets changed to something like 'Maxwell399'.

My widget has about 1100 names 'built-in' and it appends a random number from 1-10000 on the end. My script will let you rename all of the spammers in two clicks.

Once the username is changed this means that they can't log in anymore and my forum get thousands of 'active' users for free.

If you are interested in this approach then let me know and I'll post the widget source code for you. The code is not perfect but it works for me.

Once I have about 20-30 thousand users then I'll slam the door on new spammers by using the other methods (Question and Answer upon registering) to keep the bad guys out.

My program takes the original username and puts it in the 'msn' field of the vB "user" table. I put the word 'Banned' in the 'icq' field of the user table as well. This allows me to reverse the changes later if I want to.

I've decided to let the spammers work for me.

-fab

PS. You know vB, if you want to put something like this in the official release then feel free to take the code... I would have used it if it were available...