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

[salvador21]

I had presumed that when banned, their profiles are not viewable by search engines and so the links are no use. Yes, admin can see the profiles, but nobody else (I think). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

However when banning I replace the URLs they put in (and signatures which can also contain a link or two) with a link to stopforumspam.com.

[kjkoster]

*hehe* that is a clever twist. :-)

The profiles of banned users are visible, though they are not linked from the members page.

[KevinL]

If you don't allow banned to have sigs doesn't it stop this?

[salvador21]

Originally Posted by kjkoster

The profiles of banned users are visible, though they are not linked from the members page.

Oh, that's bad. Still, just as well to removed links manually when banning then.

Originally Posted by KevinL

If you don't allow banned to have sigs doesn't it stop this?

I just tested. Banned users cannot have a signature by default, but if they had a signature before banning, then it appears to remain in their Admin CP profile.

[KevinL]

hrm...you could only allow users with more then say, 1 or 2 posts have sigs? Using cybs advanced plugin?