Forum Moderators: rogerd
A couple of weeks ago I noticed that someone had actually registered for my forum. Inasmuch as it's been up for over 2 years now and no one's ever registered, I was naturally aquiver with anticipation. When I first saw it, the user hadn't completed the email-based activation. The next day it was activated, but then this person never got around to posting anything. Finally yesterday I figured out why, and I googled the user name. Sure enough, this user name has registered for a great number of forums, never posting anything at any of them.
The person had filled in the 'home page' section of the profile (at mine and everywhere else). Since the nosy search engines are always probing everyone's profiles, this would get picked up as a backlink to the person's site.
I altered my forum. There's a 'newest user' line at page bottom; I changed that so that the user name won't show up until after a post. I also changed the profile page so that the web address won't become clickable until after an arbitrary number of posts. And finally, I changed the member list page so that the WWW column doesn't get filled in until the same arbitrary number of posts has been made.
I thought you cats might be interested in the info. Personally I think it's a dirty trick, and while it doesn't really "cost" me anything, I still feel used since I am most certainly not getting my own backlink out of the deal.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be good guidelines drawn up between being SAVVY and being a SAP, and sad to say, most fall into the latter category.
phpbb3 takes all incentive away for a bot to register other than to spam posts, SE bots are treated as members with their own group and own set of permissions. Links to the memberlist page or a profile are not parsed as links. A SE bot trying to load either the memberlist page or a profile will get a "You do not have permission to access this page". Signatures are hidden by deafualt as well. the only place they can spam links is in posts.
