Thread: Banned users

you can write code into your site that tells bots not to crawl certain pages.

Spammers are evil like so many others. my current most hated internet irritaiton is malware. I think they should all be hunted down (the people that write and proliferate it) and beaten with a knotted rope.

Red

Ah yes, but the crawlers are not the problem. crawlers (or robots) are benign things that allow search engines to find your pages when someone searches for some keywords. They just just look at every page and figure out which set of keywords are useful and how relevant the page is.

You can prevent robots from indexing your site, and they will stay away. But spammers will still spam, and people will not find SRP anymore when they search for razor specific keywords. Robots are good. spammers are bad.

Are you banning there ip address as well ?

We ban certain IP ranges, as well as the IP of repeat offenders.
But IP banning has a lot of problems. If there is a proxy or NAT device somewhere in the network, you also ban everyone else who would use the same network path.
Another problem is that most consumer IP addresses are DHCP leases that are not guaranteed to stay the same. So if we ban an address like that, and it gets reassigned to another customer of the same ISP (which could be you) then the ban applies to you.
So we are very careful with IP banning.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Joe looked into it before he left.
Getting spammers out (or rather, prevening them from coming in) can be done in several ways generally:
1) have the first couple of posts approved by a moderator before they can post at will.
2) have the registration approved by a mod, who will contact the new member if there is doubt
3) have some sort of filter that can determin if a post is spam or not.

1 and 2 are a significant burden on mods, but more importantly, it discourages genuine newbies.
3 is possible, but no such filters exist atm that I known of (or so I was told) and making it yourself requires changing the vbulletin code which is not that simple.

We already have several other spam prevention methods in place, but some still get through.

Yes, 1 and 2 are not realistic for larger forums. He added all sorts of code.

Yes in theory is is quite simple.:
1) check if the poster has n number or posts. If he has, then upload without any further checking
2) scan the post for URLs. If any URL matches an URL in the URL blacklist, put the post in the approval queue for moderator attention.
3) let mods regularly check the approval queue to make a judgement call.

That would keep all spam out of the forum.
If the forum was built with C++ or on the .NET platform I could do so pretty quickly.
But instead it's php and I am not a php programmer.

Just curious, how many members are there when you net out the spammers and/or banned users?

We have about 700 spammers and a handful of people with a lifetime ban.
Don't know if they are included in the member count though.

They should still be in the user count because only their user status has changed. Banning and deletion are typically two different things.