Fighting linkspam and registration spam in ExpressionEngine

29 March, 2010

Reading the ExpressionEngine forums I note we’re not the only people getting hit with numerous spam registrations and loads of irrelevant linkspam. So it’s time to share what we’re doing and give Member Utilities a little plug now it’s been upgraded.

My previous entry about spammers seemed to strike a chord – in fact Member Utilities is being used to tackle spam effectively by a lot of people in the EE community (we love you all) but the behaviour of the spammers has changed so we’ve adapted Member Utilities to close the loop.

Something I noticed was that rather than waiting two or three days before coming back and posting linkspam, the ‘little tinkers’ were now waiting up to a couple of weeks. Obviously this makes patrolling your member profiles a nightmare, especially if you have a client who will not tolerate linkspam but doesn’t want to penalise their genuine members. Often on a high traffic site the spammers-to-be were dropping off the first member list page, so I was having to go back several pages to find them.

I asked Greg for a notification email every time someone goes in and updates their profile – the mail shows you what they’ve added so if it’s a relevant bio/URL you don’t have to visit your control panel but if it’s spam you can jump straight to it. It also stops the ones who start with ‘I am into webdesign (aren’t we all love?) and cannot wait to join in with this marvellous community’ then 3 weeks later they’ve changed it to some utter tosh – now you’ll see it the minute they hit submit.

I’ve been clearing up behind the ones who slipped through by:

• Getting a database dump of all members with bio/URL information in their profiles
• Going through and removing all the spam links and leaving the message ‘All links removed and reported as linkspam’. I did this because we noticed from the logs that some of the spammers were visiting the profiles of other spammers (in fact that’s how we found a couple of them before we did the database dump)
• Actually reporting some of them as linkspam – this makes it a lottery – we don’t want linkspammers deliberately posting their competitors sites up knowing we’ll flag them
• We also added a line in the terms alerting members to the fact that linkspam won’t be tolerated – so we can’t get any bleating about ‘not knowing’ from the ‘white hat’ SEO specialists
• Also – make sure that you go to admin > members and groups > and change the guest profile ‘can view public profiles’ to no – it’s set to yes as default (Thanks to Lisa Wess for pointing this one out)

If you’d like a copy of my list of the spammer usernames we’ve banned recently (if you don’t have access to do a database dump for example) then drop me a line and I’ll send it over. You’ll need to tell me your EE site though and have an email address associated with the domain.

Rachael posted this in Extensions, ExpressionEngine

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