Thread

I have EE2 with members only allowed to comment. I haven’t had any comment spampming but have found 3 of my last 10 members have entered advertizing URLs. Here is what they have entered:

Alex
http://wwx.lifeionizers.com/water-facts/alkaline-water-benefits.html with text and URL in profile

Seopp
http://wwx.seop.pl/pozycjonowanie-stron.php

Dime
http://wwx.startupbusinessloans.com

I entered the wwx instead of www to make these not work? Each site is some sort of promotion.

Is there any danger to my site from people who don’t seem to be interested in the content joining and entering their URLs and sometimes promotional text in their profiles?

Why are they doing this?

Is there any danger for me to deleting their membership?

Having a member community is new to me - any suggestions?

Thanks for insight and help,

Dan

Hi Dan,

There is no harm in deleting members who you don’t feel are contributing to your site in a constructive way. Most of the time people who do this are just trying to build links to their site for SEO purposes.

One thing you can do to help stop this within the EE settings is to change the member keyword to something different. I usually change it to the site name concatenated with member but you can choose anything so long as its not member.

Hope this helps.

Thank you Gareth. It doesn’t seem bad compared to some of the stories I’ve read about on the site, but I just didn’t know. I will ask my developer about the concatenation idea. Thank you for your help, Dan

No problem Dan, there is also a good post here http://ee-spotlight.com/tutorials/avoiding-captcha-with-expressionengine, that talks all about the different spam plugins you can use as well.