Implementing Anti-Spam techniques in MyBB to deter Spammers

TOC

• Disable MyCode in the
  signature to prevent signature spam
• Set all the external links to
  nofollow in mybb
• Set a separate CAPTCHA
  anti-spam security question at registration
• Disallow BBCODE/MyCode [URL]
  in postings
• Remove Home page from Contact
  Details in User Profile
• Make Profile Visible only to
  registered users

My friends, for some time I've been following some SEO
forums and reading about backlinks & spams. I've gleaned
some good insight about spamming and why a human being wants to
spam. Most likely it is only for a backlink. Remember MyBB forums
are much more susceptible than many other forums because in the
default MyBB installation(as of v1.6.2) all links are dofollow
including profile Home page. Even if you disable links in posting
& signatures, Profile Home page. will still lure spammers.
There still a big gotcha I've found in MyBB is that it
converts all text links to clickable links automatically. Unlike
in PHPBB where you have option do disable "Don't parse
url's" or "Automatic URL's" your MyBB
invariably converts them all in <a href= links with honey-dew
cream of "Dofollow".

The biggest problem with dofollow is that one it attracts
spammers. Secondly if this linked site is banned site then your
site rankings go down heavily in Google & Yahoo. That means
at all cost you must make all external links as
"nofollow". Checkout the following techniques which
I've listed while I prepared my first MyBB forum. Please
leave comments for improvement!

Disable
MyCode in the signature to prevent signature spam

Configuration->User Registration & Profile Options
-> Allow MyCode in Signatures -> Set it to NO

As of today I could not find anything else that'd disable
MyCode URL in the signature. So I was left to use this only.

 

Set all the
external links to nofollow in mybb

Just follow these steps to
make all external links nofollow.

The basic idea is to add rel=nofollow to all links in the
website using this regular expression:

Regular Expression

Code:

<a href="http([s]?)://(.*?)"

Replacement

Code:

<a href="http$1://$2" rel="nofollow"

But now even internal site links will also be tagged with
nofollow. To prevent this, create another regular expression:

Title

Code:

Dofollow

Regular Expression

Code:

<a href="http([s]?)://(|www\.)example.net(.*?)"
rel="nofollow"

Replacement

Code:

<a href="http$1://$2example.net$3"

Since my forum is on a subdomain I used this expression.
Replace example.net with your own URL! If you have more sub
domains than www just add them to the regular expression:

Code:

<a
href="http([s]?)://(|www\.|sub1\.|sub2\.)example.net(.*?)"
rel="nofollow"

Set a
separate CAPTCHA anti-spam security question at
registration

Download this plugin
by G33K. Just extract the three folders and copy-paste in the
root of your forum. To configure it follow Readme.txt.

For my site I've coined a question: "What is the
largest bank in India?" with following answers:

sbi|hdfc|icici|icici bank

Disallow
BBCODE/MyCode [URL] in postings

I could not find exactly this- disabling MyCode URL in
postings. So instead chose to do the following.

Give the Registered users no links permission and set up group
promotion that all registered users that have 5 or more posts (or
something) will be moved to a group that have link posting
permission.

To do it first install the permission
plugin. Now create a new group with link permission say
"Registered with link permission", copying its
permission from Registered group. Now go to this group and in the
last Extra tab enable link permission. Similarly remove link
permission from Registered group. Now setup group promotion
selecting Post Count and source group as Registered and Target
"Registered with link permission" and enter the count
you want the user to wait before allowing them to post links

Remove Home
page from Contact Details in User Profile

Since the website is shown as hyper link and could be misused
by spammers the Home page should be change to simple text URL. to
do it:

Go to Templates & Style -> Templates -> Default
Templates->Member Templates->

In the template 'member_profile', replace:

Code:

{$website}

with

Code:

{$memprofile['website']}

That is the website URL without the anchor tag.

This is thread

Make Profile
Visible only to registered users

 Just like in PHPBB make profiles invisible to bots and
guests. More about this here.