Protect your vBulletin installation from spam bots
I manage a few sites that run vBulletin software for their forum. I have tried a few different options before really endorsing vBulletin. I am a huge fan of free. However, the free forum scripts out there just don’t match up to vBulletin. So I encourage all of my clients to pony up the $200 if they want the best.
As with any widely available script for websites, there is always the potential for hackers and spammers to exploit it’s vulnerabilities. This is why is of the utmost importance to keep your installations up to date as well as having an experienced person or company keep everything up to date and watch for odd behaviors.
In these installations, I employ the standard securities; human verification, email confirmation, Akismet and diligent moderation. There are always a few that sneak through. Sometimes however, there are more than a few.
I made the mistake recently of thinking that the reason there are so many vBulletin registrations that never end up being regular forum contributors was that the span filter was blocking their attempts as this is common on all of my forums.
Two weeks ago, I woke to over 200 emails from new registrants on one of my vBulletin forums. This was way more than this site normally received so I dug a little bit into why this might be. A good portion of the registration emails had the same domain. This seemed suspicious to me.
What I ended up finding was that they were not signing up and realizing that I was too crafty for them and moving on, they were signing up with no intention of even trying to post. What they were doing was creating an account and placing links to their golf/porn/pham sites in their signature with obviously SEO oriented back link anchor text to suck some ‘Google juice’ from my sites.
So what I ended up doing to keep this from continuing was to add NOFOLLOW and NOINDEX to the meta tag robots for the members.php page on all of my vB installations.
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
