Ok so I’m sick of spammers using their signatures to post spam so signatures are now disabled for newly registered users.
This is added to PM’s being disabled and spam checking on posts for users less than a certain number of posts. If you’re here to participate in composites discussions these measures will be lifted quickly when you frequently participate.
What is with spam? I don’t get the point. Canyon you do a great job of keeping it out. But I just don’t get why people spam. Do they really get that many people to go to their site and buy something? Almost like telemarketers, you wonder how they stay in business cause I don’t know of anyone who has ever bought something from one. But there has to be those people out there that do buy their stuff cause otherwise they wouldn’t be in business. Or am I missing something with the hole spam telemarketer thing? Sorry I just didn’t know where to put my rant about spam. 
To get a site up in Google quickly, you can effectively post links everywhere that look like this:
[ url = www. compositescentral .net] composites [ /url ] (without the spaces, of course).
Spamming this all over will quickly bring Compositescentral.net on the first place of Google.
The spam that many forums receive is created by automated scripts, that automatically search forums of a particular make (VBulletin in this case), register an account, and put the above link in a useless post, or in a signature. Google drops by every now and then, crawling for links, and signals that link (either in the forum, or in a user profile). This will bring that particular site up.
Best thing is to stop robots at the door. Is there a VBulletin mod that can use the peoplesign system? I use it on my phpbb board, and in some 10 days not a single spam registration. Works much better than normal captchas.
Thanks for the explination herman I knew it had to be automated.
Don’t know if there’s a peoplesign system. There’s one that references with Akismet but I’ve opted not to use it to keep the forum code simple so I can upgrade easily without breaking too many features.
The peoplesign mod that I use does not use any changed code within phpbb. I must admit that phpbb checks which captcha modules are available, and show them in a dropdown list, but installing is less than 2 minutes work.
For the rest I do agree with you that upgrading a heavily modded board is a pig to do. phpbb has an option now to continuously “patch” the code to next versions. I trust VBulletin will either have this available as well, or are developing it. They simply cannot stay behind.
Still, spam and hacking attemps are a nuisance at best. Last week some hackers gave me a hard time when they broke into my server, messing up things. The security leak was published 1 day before.
We’re under attack eek! :eek:
I wonder how much spam would be on here if Canyon didn’t disable the PM and Sigs for new users.
I’ve got to find the mod that Herman suggested. This is getting way too out of hand
Since the mod, I had 3 people post spam on my board. I must be popular with “real people spammers”.
I found the Peoplesign plugin list for you, but unfortunately no VBulletin (yet). I suggest asking for it on a VBulletin support forum. I do not have the skills to write a plugin.
Thanks for the link. I’m not very good at coding either. I’ll look for other more aggressive filtering options.