Special User Sections > Site/Forum Features

Changes to Forum Profile Visibility

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mouser:
Over the years the DonationCoder forum seems to become an increasingly appealing target for "profile spammers" -- people who sign up on the forum and fill their forum profile fields (like website, signature, etc.) to ridiculous spam advertisements for batteries or whatever.

Presumably the idea is less to get humans to see these links and text, and more to get the search engines to pick up on them and trick google-type algorithms to think that DonationCoder is linking to these sites approvingly.  We have always had "nofollow" tags on these links which should eliminate that, but who knows.

Anyway, i've recently made some modifications that essentially block all such links from forum profiles and in post sidebars, until the forum member has actually made a few posts.  This will give us an extra little bit of time to ban people and should serve as an additional disincentive to going through the trouble of creating these spam accounts.

Let me know if you spot anything strange on the forum as a result of these changes.

rjbull:
It's  no problem for me.  I switched off seeing all that stuff in my profile   ;)  Saves a lot of screen space.

IainB:
I use Google Reader to aggregate and view all posts from blogs and forums that I am interested in .
That gives me a view with one line for each post or discussion comment.

Google Reader automatically presents me with one-line lists of all posts since I last marked them as read.
If I (say) don't want to see all the comments in all the threads, but only the NEW posts, then I can sort (for example) for "-Re:" in Donation Coder -  and look at it in list view. That shows me all of the new posts - they don't have "Re:" in the subject line.

Hoping this could be useful to someone out there.

OldElmerFudd:
I haven't experienced any problems...but I'm a little dense, admittedly.  :-[

IainB:
@OldElmerFudd:
...but I'm a little dense, admittedly.  :-[
--- End quote ---
Well, that might put you at an advantage here, then - being a a little dense being less worse than being very dense...
 :P

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