Referral ID's in members website addresses allowed?

[Wile_E]

I've opened up a couple members profiles, and clicked on the website they have listed. The websites are questionable, like some cheesy search engine websites, and the link contains a referral ID. The link also redirects to other chessy websites. Are these allowed or should I report the user?

[Nelson37]

Not sure if this is within the rules or not, but I personally would absolutely report the user. No harm done if the actions are legit, and this might save some poor soul some real grief.

[redwudz]

You could PM one of the Mods or Baldrick with the info and we can look into it.

[nwo]

it's bot spam i get them all the time on my forum!

[thecoalman]

it's bot spam i get them all the time on my forum!

If it's phpbb2 you can just about stop them dead with this mod: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=383305

[Marvingj]

Very interesting, Hopefully this will be answer by Baldrick?

[Baldrick]

it's bot spam i get them all the time on my forum!

If it's phpbb2 you can just about stop them dead with this mod: http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=383305

I'm going to install a question registration mod after my vacation.

[thecoalman]

Give me the keys and I'll have it installed in 2 minutes <yeah right> .

9 months and counting with 0 bot registrations using that mod. If I remeber correctly that mod requires very few edits. Most of it is in a module for the ACP.

[Baldrick]

But I think many of our spam users aren't bots.

[Ai Haibara]

Yeah - I've only seen two or so posters in the past few months that were probably bots. It likely isn't difficult for someone to place a referrer link in their profile, at any rate. :/

[thecoalman]

But I think many of our spam users aren't bots.

Won't do anyhting for them, you have to remove the incentive. Put it in the registration you use the no-follow tag on all links and the memberlist is banned under robots.txt . That will only leave the ones posting just to get the transient traffic. Not really worth the effort except fot the stickies.

phpbb3 actually address many of these things. Bots are in special group, you don't even have to robots.txt many pages that can be abused becasue they can't get to them at all.