NoFollow links to discourage spammers

[Celeste Stewart]

I just realized that CC's forum does NOT use the nofollow attribute which may be why the spammers love posting their links here. Any way that nofollow can be turned on? It may eventually help to get CC's forum delisted from spambot software.

[jrichards]

nofollows added.

Thanks for the suggestion.
jrichards
Support
Constant-Content

[Celeste Stewart]

Well drat, now I have no where put all my spammy links! Thanks Jeff!

[dmgray]

Celeste you beat me to that suggestion - good option. The current bunch of malevolent spambots are probably already programmed on a cycle so you may have to ban them via username to remove them.

I am still working on the linking to main CC registration option.

I would suggest removing the option to add links to posts but I know that in many cases posts refer back to useful CC information using links, so that may not be an option. What about setting an initial restriction on adding links until you have x amount of posts? Not sure what you think about this?

There is a phpBB mod for this here:

http://www.phpbb.com/mods/db/index.php? ... b_id=10315

I did find a clever method of changing the forum registration fields for new users that will stop most auto sign-up software.

Basically, you just add some custom fields that ask a question and require selection of an answer from a drop-down menu. The default answer will be rejected as false. Any human user can select the correct answer but spambots will leave it as the default.

Quite amusing as the person who came up with this solution suggested using the question, "Are you a spammer or a spambot?" and the default answer is set to "YES"!

You can see how to add this function step-by-step here:

http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article/custom- ... mmer-tool/

I used the last method on a board I run and have had good results.