Spamming & rel=nofollow attributes (Attn: SPCNET)

[atlantean0208]

This thread is for SPCNET to read .

Recently, lots of spammers who registered just to leave their account and never return. The main purpose is to improve their google ranking by leaving their website URL in their signature.

Whenever goggle bot doing its daily job of indexing pages, it will usually calculating the PageRank link popularity scores for the whatever link that it found on various places such forum thread or signature.

Based on this, SPAMMER will use this feature for their *FREE* advertising of their porn website etc and also improve their google ranking. I'm sure you don't want your website to be used just like that by all this Russian spamming bugger. The only way to prevent this is to make sure that all their effort of leaving link in the signature a useless effort.

This can be done by adding the "nofollow" attribute for all links:

The new attribute is called "nofollow" with rel="nofollow" being the format inserted within an anchor tag. When added to any link, it will effectively serve as a flag to tell the search engines that the link has not been explictly approved by the site owner, and therefore "not follow" it, or not use the referring page's (on your site) Page Rank in any way.

If Google sees nofollow as part of a link, it will:

1. NOT follow through to that page.
2. NOT count the link in calculating PageRank link popularity scores.
3. NOT count the anchor text in determining what terms the page being linked to is relevant for.

You can download and install the nofollow mod for free at:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=93780

I see that you use the captcha image to prevent robot registering. However those measures is useless now as an OCR software already added to correctly read the captcha images by SPAMMING software. The only way to prevent those is to install the vbulletin Question and Answer Verification system, also available here:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=183329

I'm sure there will be no more effort is needed to catch spammer manually after this . If you want some help, just PM me.

[atlantean0208]

This is the code that I create for phpBB and is used in this website, I will look the code for vBulletin later on. The purpose of this code is to prevent new member to post URL to images or links if their post is lower then the specified value (in the code I used 5). Once post bigger than 5, then URL posting is enable. It's very good to prevent the one-time registrant to be pissed off and move on to attack other website and will not coming back.

I just downloaded the source code for vBulletin just now and will devise a similar coding. It should be similar. I will installed the vBulletin in one of my servers and do a live test with the mod/hack.

Once I'm done, and if you want to use it, you will only need to FTP the file, download it, apply the patch, overwrite and voila. No more bleeding-eye porn images, like I saw today - ugghh. It's NSFW (not safe for work) and many of us here is browsing SPCNET at the office.

if ($userdata['user_posts'] < 6)
{
$disallow_guesturl_array = explode(',', '[url, [img, [youtube, www., http:, .com, .org, .us, .ru, .net, .co, .gov');

// Check if $message contains one of the strings like "http:"...
for ($i = 0; $i < count($disallow_guesturl_array); $i++)

{
// stristr() used instead of eregi() because of searching for "[url" which contains a squared bracket
if (trim($disallow_guesturl_array[$i]) != '' && stristr($message, trim($disallow_guesturl_array[$i])))
{
$error_msg .= (!empty($error_msg)) ? '<br />' . '<b>Junior Member URL Posting - DISALLOW!<b><br /><a href=\'viewtopic.php?t=1663\'>READ MORE</a>' : '<b>Junior Member URL Posting - DISALLOW!</b><br /><a href=\'viewtopic.php?t=1663\'>READ MORE</a>';
break;
}
}
}

[spcnet]

Just noticed this thread. Thanks for the tip, will see about implementing the rel=nofollow attribute for links and look into that OCR software as next batch of forum updates.

[atlantean0208]

Just noticed this thread. Thanks for the tip, will see about implementing the rel=nofollow attribute for links and look into that OCR software as next batch of forum updates.

yeah, once you install the vbulletin Question and Answer Verification system, there will be no more auto registration for spam-bot. However SPAMMER can still register themselves manually, but that should be very rare. Most spammer use the auto registration software such as the forum poster which got the OCR capability.

However the most effective way to completely overcome the spam-bot is to disable the [URL] and [IMG] bbcode for newly registered user and only will be lifted when user post bigger than certain number such as 5 or 10 which will be a secret.