Profile page spammers

[ForestForTrees]

Recently, I've been noticing people who sign up for an account and set their "Home Page" and "About You" settings to spammy links. I was able to find a bunch through the following SQL because the vast majority of our users don't set "Home Page"s:

SELECT user_id, homepage FROM `xf_user_profile`
ORDER BY `xf_user_profile`.`homepage`  DESC

Any thoughts on how to handle this? Most of the IP numbers creating the accounts come from India or the Phillipines.

 

[ForestForTrees]

I've replaced the .com in all URLs in this post with .tld to render the links useless.

The following is an example of the type of post I'm talking about. At least they eat their own dog food.

IP number: from Vietnam. Only .04% of our traffic is from vietnam.
Username: andrena083 (It may seem silly, but I've shifted two of the numerical digits in the username to preserve the user's privacy. Privacy protection is in my blood.)
About You:

Natural forum link building - Developing your website by using natural and powerful forum link building method.

Home page: http://good-backlink.tld/forum-link-building-service.html

Other than making the above changes to their profile page, they had no other activity on the site. Never made any posts.

Another tipoff is that their profile says that they are from somewhere, but their IP number is from India or the Phillipines, where most of my profile spammers come from.

A second example:
IP number: from India
Location: UAE
Home page: http://alsharid.tld/
About You:

Best bookkeeping and accounting services in Dubai. We offer an array of general accounting, audit and consulting services for SME's to clients throughout Dubai and the United Arab Emirates. We support with general bookkeeping tasks, compilation of financial statements & much more.

consulting services for sme
accounting outsourcing services

Status: Best bookkeeping and accounting services in Dubai.

Only visited the forum once. Never made any posts.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

https://xenforo.com/community/resources/stophumanspam-anti-human-spam.1480/

 

[ForestForTrees]

Unfortunately, it looks like Tenant has taken on a full time job and may decrease the frequency of software updates for his addons. In my mind, his addons are legendary, though. No one cared as much about abolishing spam as him.

Our forum is tiny with only one or two new signups per day and only about 45 posts per day, so I like to take a very hands-on, active approach to spam. Specifically, if anyone does anything that might raise a flag, I don't want them blocked. Rather, I want them put in moderation so that I can investigate them and potentially ban them. The downside of Stop Human Spam for us is that it blocks spammer's attempts rather than sending them to moderation. I really want a little red numbered box to appear in the moderator bar at the top of the screen whenever someone makes a post that is blocked.

Am I interpreting things right that SHS won't do this? I know that blocked attempts are logged in the ACP, but I don't think I'd actually check. This is the "killer feature" for us. I really want to send spammers the message that they will get zero benefit from posting on our forum and they WILL be reported to StopForumSpam.

 

[ForestForTrees]

Speaking of StopForumSpam, there is an interesting discussion at StopForumSpam about Profile spam in their members only section:
http://www.stopforumspam.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=42370
It looks like they do consider a link placed in a profile to be spam, so reporting someone for a spammy link in a profile is okay with them. In contrast, if they haven't posted any spam yet and you just suspect them of doing so, my bet is that they wouldn't be okay with that.

 

[dethfire]

This is still a major issue for my site. I get dozens of sign ups a day where spammers just put links in various profile fields, then they spam other sites with a link to the profile page. It's really a horrible problem.

 

[Max Taxable]

This is still a major issue for my site. I get dozens of sign ups a day where spammers just put links in various profile fields, then they spam other sites with a link to the profile page. It's really a horrible problem.

Stop the bots at the door:

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