I'm not sure how many people are aware of the phenomena of online stores registering on message board, not to post, but to put in their profile a link to their site in hopes that some google bot is going to find the link and up their ranking. If you don't understand how this work type in 'miserable failure' into Google. I have gone through and deleted a lot of these accounts, but they continue to register despite emails telling them to stop and phone calls. I'm having a problem with one place in particular, skinstore dot com, who by all appearences, seems to be a legitamite business.

I'm wondering how many others have noticed skinstore doing this? Is there any legal action that could be taken against them? Why this rubs me the wrong way is that someone is trying to benefit from what to me is a hobby that requires lots of time and hard work.

Cheers

Turn on registration moderation. Problem solved. Takes about a week for them to figure out thye are not going to get anywhere with you and they move on to someplace easier. Give it another week or two and turn moderation off if you want to.

I got about 40 in one day, all was regged just a few seconds from each other. I deleted them and turned on approval for new memebers and it stopped. after a few weeks I set it back to norm and havent got one yet.

Skinstore is the most famous one.

You can also exclude anything that contains that info from being spidered. Check it out Here not that it will prevent them from registering but it sure will keep the word from getting out via their profiles.

I approve every registration, unfortunately it is hard to tell alot of the times if it is legit or not. Recently the name has started with and aa in it.

In addition you can make your profiles members only, thus removing the benefit of said persons from registering. Another idea is to stop accepting throw away email ids.

I've had the same problem on 20+ boards. Things to check for....

They like to use usernames starting with "a" or zero, so that they appear on page one of the user list.
Check the userlist, particularly those on the first couple of pages periodically for user's with cialis, viagra, diet pills sites as their home page.
Turn off the user list for anonymous users.

I collected a bunch of information on the "000" user that was posting everywhere. Kept denying thier membership with the reason: "Spammer: IP address logged for legal action."

Add their website name to your banned words list, voila! no chance to get it linked

Yeah, I don't think the badwords filter works in the homepage setting. These folks put it as their homepage link - then get themselves to page 1 of the user list, and presto - a free linkback from a site with good google ranking.

Allen & Josh, I added a quick mod for this right here...

https://www.ubbdev.com/forum/showflat...SID=#Post117572

Well we could obviously just let it go, I mean it really isn't doing any harm to my website, I just find it irritating that someone is using my "hobby" for their own benefit.

Josh, I've seen the warning on a couple of your sites, have you found this to be a good deterant or do people just ignore it knowing that you are most likely not going to do something about it.

I've actually considered posting an article on Slashdot about it. Knowing that place they'd probably get DDoSed or hacked

It was one user - with an IP from the netherlands doing it in mass on many of the sites I have / maintain. So yes, they have stopped.

Twisty - good mod -thanks!

yeah, thanks for the mod, should be in the base code

I just recieved a few emails from the sk1nst0r3 people. They think it is there affiliates but possibly an internal problem. Will everyone that has had them post stuff send me a PM with some information, I'm basically trying to figure out if this guy is full of crap or not.

Thanks!

When it has happened I've removed the info directly so I don't have any of the links used left.

What I've done to stop the problem is add a little mod that checks for ip bans before lettings users create new accounts and then ban all IP:s used by those accounts who has added these links. I've also removed the memberlist for users who aren't logged in, which should make sure they won't be interested in the future.