If you run any kind of forum you probably will need to deal with this problem sooner or later. And sometimes this problem is not easily noticeable in an active forum such as the one I am responsible for with our free fansite hosting community.
The problem we faced were spammers signing up — not to post their trash in the forums — but to get that free link that is displayed on the members list and profile pages. These spammers… A.K.A “Member Registration Link Spammers” sign up with nicknames that look like “alphabet soup” and never post a thing to keep from being noticed.
This spam tactic had slipped past our moderators and went unnoticed for too long. Its not bad enough that our site was linking to some real trashy material… but also, these links can damage your SEO value to your site. Google is known to penalize sites for linking to these “bad neighborhoods” and could cause a website to be de-indexed entirely.
So what can we do about this problem? We already implemented a captcha to the registration process… but they get right past that. I did some research and found two mods for our phpBB forum that seem like it would tackle our issue.
1) MOD Title: Anti-Spam ACP:
This adds another section in the admin section of your forum that hides that extra profile info such as that website link… thus taking away the spammers reason to be signing up to your forum. This mod also can send you an email warning you of anyone attempting to bypass this and reports their IP.
2) MOD Title: Prune Inactive Users:
This makes it easy to delete those users signing up with “alphabet soup” usernames whom never post and who’s only purpose is to get that free link to their pr0n site or whatever garbage they are pushing.
By implementing these two mods… we have now eliminated those spammers websites being linked from our forum and have a much easier way to prune these members from our member list.
