Why does vBulletin allow users to visitor message themselves?

[MarkFL]

Hello all!

I was wondering about this after seeing that one of our users had sent a visitor message to themselves, and the visitor message contained links. I deleted the visitor message, and then got to thinking that no one should need to send a visitor message to themselves, but since this is allowed by vBulletin I thought perhaps there is a good reason.

I am considering making it to that our users cannot visitor message themselves, but I wanted to ask here first about the possible consequences. What do you all think?

[ForceHSS]

VM?

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by ForceHSS

VM?

Sorry, I thought that was standard vBulletin vernacular...VM = visitor message

I edited the thread title and my first post so that my question is clear.

[kh99]

Maybe so you can post a reminder to send yourself a PM.

But seriously, I don't know but I'd guess that since they would have had to write code to check for that, someone just decided "why not".

[ForceHSS]

Do you not have vm turned off for guests

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by ForceHSS

Do you not have vm turned off for guests

I don't allow guest to even view user profiles, they are sent straight to the registration form if they try.

What I saw the other night was a newly registered member send themselves a visitor message. This shows up on their profile and on the activity stream and struck me as just another way to spam. To me it seems unnecessary to allow users to post messages on their own wall like that.

[ForceHSS]

Am sure with a small plugin that can be turned off

[MarkFL]

Originally Posted by ForceHSS

Am sure with a small plugin that can be turned off

What I did on my dev site is to edit the "memberinfo_block_visitormessaging" template, and wrap the editor form with the following conditional:

<vb:if condition="$userinfo['userid'] != $bbuserinfo['userid']">
	editor form code here
</vb:if>

So, I posted in our staff forum to discuss it with my fellow admins on our live site, but I also wanted to bring points made here by others with vBulletin experience to our discussion as to why we might not want to disable this.

[ForceHSS]

If you had plugins to stop spammers then you would not need a plugin to stop it from being misused by members but on the other hand it might be good to have something like this to stop it from happening in the future. If no one here will make you one ask on ozzys site I am sure he will

[MarkFL]

I decided to go ahead and make the change on our live site. We found no compelling reason to allow our users to post visitor messages on their own wall, and this will prevent n00bs from posting to their own wall when responding to incoming visitor messages.