1 Topic by J. M.

  • J. M.
  • New Member
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  • Registered: 2010-05-31
  • Posts: 1

Topic: pun_antispam and website links

Hello,

The primary reason why people were registering in a forum I am involved with was putting a website link in their profile. Because PunBB shows the user list with the user profiles to everyone, including Google, they use it for improving their search engine ranking - without actually posting anything (Google indexes the user list including the links in the user profiles). This sort of silent spam is difficult to deal with.

So, the obvious solution would be disabling website links in user profiles completely. Surprisingly, this seems to be impossible in PunBB:

1. "User info in posts" can be disabled in forum settings, but unfortunately, this hides everything else, including the post count, which is not desirable (there is already the "User post count" feature which can disable displaying post count, so it does not seem to make any sense to duplicate it in the other option, too - especially when disabling "User info in posts" disables post count even if "User post count" is enabled). Furthermore, users can still put website links in their profiles and the user list is still accessible to Google, which means spammers still abuse the forum for silent SEO spam.

2. The Antispam System extension promises putting restrictions on adding website links. Alas, the restriction is ineffective. Spammers cannot put their website link in the registration form, but they can add it later, in their user profile. Which is exactly what they do. The good thing is that the website link is not displayed anymore to anonymous users in the user profiles, so Gooogle cannot see it, but they can still put it there and they either don't care or don't know that Google cannot see it. So spammers still abuse the forum daily and put their website links into the forum database, which has to be cleaned up afterwards.

So, could the Antispam System extension disable website links completely? Or is there any other way to disable putting website links in user profiles (not only displaying them) completely (or to everyone except moderators and administrators or other trusted users)? The website links, coupled with the publicly accessible user list, is IMO a major spam hole in PunBB which attracts spammers.

Thanks.

2 Reply by torbz

  • Registered: 2007-07-17
  • Posts: 10

Re: pun_antispam and website links

Have to agree with you there on every point.
I was getting maybe 10 registrations a day. I took the forum down for a few days, hoping an upgrade from 1.2.22 to 1.3.4 would help solve spamming issues.

It didn't - and when I upgraded and switched back on - I had 10 reg's in about one hour.
It seems I'm targetted by manual spammers and I think there are teams of people in low-wage countries who are paid a pittance to do this - India seems to be a favourite source of such team-spamming.

I also thought the antispam mod would relieve the pressure - but as you said above - it doesn't seem to help much.

I suspect the ultimate mod would be one that allow users to put whatever they like in the signatures, but if it contains a URL, either live or not, an email gets sent to the admin to approve the signature.

Sadly, I don't have the time to do this myself but it would be a welcome addition.

  • KeyDog
  • KeyDog
  • Global Moderator
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  • Registered: 2008-12-12
  • Posts: 1,693

Re: pun_antispam and website links

J. M. wrote:

could the Antispam System extension disable website links completely?

Agree this would be a good idea!

torbz wrote:

India seems to be a favourite source of such team-spamming

You could use Pun Approval extension in a first step, it's very effective in letting you decide who gets added to the database.