Forum change to thwart spambots & spammers

Please check this section for any important announcements regarding the NSS discussion board.

Moderator: Moderators

Forum change to thwart spambots & spammers

Postby Wayne Harrison » Mar 28, 2006 6:36 pm

I've been manually deleting spambots and spammer accounts that register just to get a link to their Web site in their member profile, but today I added some additional automatic measures that newly registered users need to be aware of.

When you register, you won't see blanks to put in a link to your Web site or put in a signature (which can contain a web link). Those areas will not be visible until you activate your registration and you go into your profile (button above) and add them.

Additionally, I have made it so that web sites listed in member profiles are no longer visible on the memberlist (button above). You can see individual web sites, however, by going to the member's profile.

By way of further explantion for those who are interested, some spammers register on forums with fake email addresses, never intending to activate their account and do it only to put in a web link to whatever site they are trying to promote -- figuring search robots will find the web link on the site (the theory is the more times a site is linked on the web, the higher it will be in the search engine rankings).

These two modifications hopefully will remove the ability of robots to find the links. As an added backup measure, I have removed access to the forum memberlist file by robots by adding it to the instructions posted in the robots.txt file on the server. It tells them in so many words, "Move along, nothing to see here."
User avatar
Wayne Harrison
NSS Hall Of Fame Poster
 
Posts: 2382
Joined: Aug 30, 2005 5:29 pm
Location: Pine, Colorado
NSS #: 18689 FE
Primary Grotto Affiliation: unaffiliated
  

Return to Please Read

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users

cron