Suggestion: Disable sigs on here for guests.

Okay, guys, please keep the thread on topic.

Chris, you use the words "pretty sure" in regards to your recent influx of spam coming from vBulletin.org - this does not seem like a very strong argument. I see this as a potentially very unpopular feature to implement, so I like to hear a bit more before giving an opinion on the matter.

Originally Posted by Danny.VBT

Okay, guys, please keep the thread on topic.

Chris, you use the words "pretty sure" in regards to your recent influx of spam coming from vBulletin.org - this does not seem like a very strong argument. I see this as a potentially very unpopular feature to implement, so I like to hear a bit more before giving an opinion on the matter.

Don't sweat it then. I'm handy with vB so I have no problem with the bots, but looking at the general forums here and on vb.com, it seems like a LOT of people lately are getting attacked by bots tailored to get around/through the vB registration process in particular.

My 'pretty sure' stemmed from this - My site has been up for about 3 weeks now, and the first two of them was without any members/users other than myself and a handful of guys helping me sort out the basic layout. I had no guest views, no spiders, no link submissions, and no links to it anywhere in my sig. The first place I put the link in my signature was here. Since I'm building a new site from scratch, naturally I'm spending a good deal of time here so really this has been the only forum other than my own that I've actually been on. Within a day or so of changing my URL in my sig from sevenstring.org to my new one, I had five or 5 bot registrations such as this fellow with the tell-tale "Biography: Man".



So putting two and two together, my first guests, spiders and spammer came shortly after putting a hotlink to my site in my signature here. I don't want to install this thing on my machine for a screenshot, but a two second google for "URL Harvester" comes up with a bunch of freeware tools to extract links, so that even malcontents with no scripting skill whatsoever can easily garner oodles of vB-based URLs from this place.

My suggestion to turn them off might be hasty, but that's what I'd do. Perhaps "let's come up with a way to protect links in signatures" would go over better. I realize people are concerned about taking a SEO hit, especially for smaller sites, but with the variety of free and commercial SEO tools out there, anyone serious about SEO shouldn't need the outlink from here anyway. (Again, just my opinion, albeit most likely unpopular, but again I am a die-hard vBSEO guy). I just don't want vBulletin to turn into something like phpBB where 5 minutes after an install you immediately have 1,000 posts for porno, and it does (again, in my opinon) appear that the script kiddies are targeting vB lately, an opinion that I feel is backed up by the amount of "Help, spam!" posts popping up in the general forums within the last month or so.

I put my URL in my signature here mainly so that my fellow vB admins can take a look at my site and if I do something nifty, they're more than welcome to take my code or shoot me a PM asking how I did something. I am not trying to sound smug or anything like that, but I get my SEO and link saturation through proper methods using the tools available and do not need guest views on here to promote my website. I think the general concensus of "No guest views will be bad for my site" can be offset by the fact that doing something about it will help the many new vB webmasters out there who aren't comfortable/savvy/familiar enough with vB yet to install the mods, make server changes and in general take the necessary steps to prevent their new forums from being overrun with spam.

So let me adjust my initial post then and say this: If there is interest I'd be willing to throw my hat in the ring to come up with a solution to prevent the possibility of this site being harvested by spammers for URLs to target. Whether that be turning off sigs for guests, encrypting sig URLs or some other means, I am willing to lend a hand because that's the nature of this community (even though that premise seems to get lost lately).