Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

We ban a lot of spammers, but the web link in their user profile will remain accessible. I noticed that on this forum section the http part is replaced by an X, but that's not done, I think, on the other forums. Wouldn't it be better to delete the web link part entirely? I suppose that for the existing accounts that can be done with a php script on the database level, for new cases an admin would have to do it.

Well, they still exist but they are not active any more. We used to remove it completely in the past and then it was decided to keep remove the http part to deactivate it. So I guess it's better to continue like that.

Right. It depends on the context.

Links in the "website" field are always made active by the forum, so I move them to some other field.

No good reason for not simply deleting them, I just thought it might be useful to keep them to see if the same links are coming back.

For links in the signature field, I generally just disable the bbcode and "auto-aactivate urls" options. That means that addresses in the signature will appear as plain text, which will not be picked up by web crawlers.

If you see any live spam links, please report a link to the page, or a user name, so we can track down where they're coming from.

I mainly asked this because all registered users, including search bots, can access that information, and I hate the idea that the members list is a database for spam links, or that the links could help making the sites linked to better search-able.

Anyway, there's a lot of such links in the Vietnamese forum. Who will take care of them?

I seem to recall that someone (Hagar? Terry?) had a way to run SQL queries for such links, or at least to purge banned/inactive registrations.

I've checked the bots permissions and they cannot browse the member list (same for unregistred user). So I don't think those cropped links can still be searchable, except if there are some tricks.

As for VI, I've sent a mail (3 weeks ago at least) asking admin role to edit them but have not received any reply...

Terry had indeed made an automatic script to remove inactive registrations but I doubt it really worked because we still have old registrations never activated.

Hagar Delest wrote:... Terry had indeed made an automatic script to remove inactive registrations ...

Maybe an item for the admin "to do" list (if not already there)?

Added to the todo list.