A tip from me to you

[IchBin]

Like many others I had a few spammers hit my site a while ago. I recently went through the members on my site and started looking at the profiles. There were quite a few members who had links to spam stuff in their profiles. Which made me think, why do I allow people to edit their profiles so easily when they sign up? So here's my tip to you. I've done this on my site, and on the TinyPortal site. After doing it I saw there was a post about it at SMF as well.

If you don't have post based groups enabled you'll need to turn them on. Admin > Permissions > Settings > Enable permissions for post count based groups.

So this is how I've set the permissions on the "newbie group".
Edit account settings: check disallow
Edit additional profile settings: check disallow
Edit custom title: check disallow

I then altered the next post based group to be 10 posts required. Which means they have to post 10 times before they change to the next post based group jr. Member. In this group I have allowed them to edit their profile. Make sure you also alter the Ungrouped Members group to  disallow the profile settings or it will override your post based group settings.

Cheers!

[Jokey]

Great advice there Ich! I have been doing that since I started my forum over 2 years ago! Another thing I do is use the choose avatar on registration mod and when it was really bad for a while I just made it so only I could approve thier membership and would send them a email from the forum requesting confirmation they wanted to join, after 2 days, delete the ones that did not answer!  :laugh:

[bloc]

Great tip indeed - as mentioned earlier it never crossed my mind to adjust the post groups to stop spammers.

[Ianedres]

Truly a good scheme to help deter the *#)(&%_# spammers. I so wish there was a sure-fire way to eliminate such pests.

[Jokey]

Truly a good scheme to help deter the *#)(&%_# spammers. I so wish there was a sure-fire way to eliminate such pests.

yeah but that's against the law! LOL!! 

[Renegd98]

Excellent ideas.... I have instituted this over at TPM.

Thanks for sharing IchBin.

[Zetan]

Good tip  :up: I may implement this on my site, although we don't currently have a spam problem since installing reCAPTCHA. I also only allow new members to post to a Welcome board before they can post in any other board/topic. Unlikely that a spam bot will post there.