I’m seeing registrations for users whose “website” URL is very dubious (including adult stuff that would make most people blush). They’re obviously only registering for the link because they don’t leave any comments.

If the admin goes along with the recommended action of marking the user as blocked (rather than deleting), then their link is still visible in the profile page. i.e. They win.

So I’m imagining a core enhancement or a plugin that adds a filter so that any user who is marked as bozo/blocked has their details passed through a sanitizer which removes anything that looks like a URL before it’s passed to the UI.

[@thomasklaiber Member 17 years, 12 months ago]

The next thing is, every Username links to the Website, too.

But as i looked quickly throuh the functions I think this is something for a core change. The users website is passed from get_profile_info_keys() in an array to bb_profile_data(). This function generates the data-List and makes the Link clickable .. but there is no point where you can add a Plugin.

The array from get_profile_info_keys() is passed trough a filter, maybe something like a if (in_array(...)) in the filter …?

Just a thought…

[@ear1grey Member 17 years, 12 months ago]

Indeed, though I’ve only seen once instance so far where the spammers have bothered to leave a comment. My guess is that it’s too difficult to write a robot that can leave intelligent spam, so they’re hedging their bets and hoping not to be spotted lurking in the profile pages – if you can achieve that on several thousand instances you’ve suddenly got a whole lot of pagerank coming your way.

Perhaps another useful tool would be to list the lurkers (similar to how bozos & blocked users can be listed in the Users admin tab) where a lurker is someone who’s registered but not commented.