Bad Links from Spammers Profiles - Removal

I am thinking that if a spammer joins our site and makes no posts - but they add a URL in their profile to a known bad site, that could potentially look bad on my site. The first thing I want to do is make people have a few posts before they can enter a homepage url. Also, if someone becomes banned I would like their homepage info removed (for that part we may have to do manually -no biggie)

Not sure if you guys already have a solution for this?

================================

When members register they are in group id - 2 (want to display no homepage info)

After 5 posts - they are moved/promoted to group id - 19 (want them to be able to display homepage info)

I am thinking of editing modifyprofile template in 3.8 to include a conditional if statement

Current Code:

Code:

<fieldset class="fieldset">
                <legend><label for="tb_homepage">$vbphrase[home_page_url]</label></legend>
                <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="$stylevar[formspacer]" border="0" width="100%">
                <tr>
                    <td>$vbphrase[let_other_visitors_know_url]</td>
                </tr>
                <tr>
                    <td>$vbphrase[home_page_url]<br /><input type="text" class="bginput" name="homepage" id="tb_homepage" value="$bbuserinfo[homepage]" size="50" maxlength="200" dir="ltr" /></td>
                </tr>
                </table>
            </fieldset>

I am not good with conditionals and am looking for some help - or an alternative suggestions - you guys have always been great with answers in the past. Not sure of the variable I need as well like $bbusergroup=2 or $groupid=2 ?

I wrote a plugin and basic how to here:
What countries do you ban, totally

As I said in the other thread, thank you for sharing that.

Everything seems great except...

I still can't seem to find how to restrict the "greenhorn" group from being able to post a link to their homepage

In the usergroup permissions, set
Can Edit Own Profile
to no
and don't offer the homepage url as an option on registration. They will not be able to edit it until they've been 'promoted'.

Thanks Brian - everything seems to be going great now

Now I have a bigger problem. As a result google's bots are unable to reach the site. I have no idea why but this is the only change we have made recently.

Yahoo and MSN bots are still seen hourly, but Google webmaster tools reports the site unavailable to google bot.

Any ideas?

This modification has nothing to do with guest visits... Google never registers on your site.

Make sure you changed the correct group-- and didn't alter the not logged in groupID.

I was able to load your site with no issues, but it was very slow. Perhaps google is timing out to your server?

That's what I thought, but I have made no other changes in the last 6 months.

Here's the details of what's happening. Google every day shows that it has downloaded my sitemap, but gives an error symbol. What I mean is the date is always current, but it has just started this error in the last 2 days.



Also, who's online section of our forums: I have not seen the google bot on in 2 days. It was on at all times of the day, everyday since the site started.

The error given by google sounds like time out issue:
Network unreachable: DNS issue
We encountered an error while trying to access your Sitemap. Please ensure your Sitemap follows our guidelines and can be accessed at the location you provided and then resubmit.

And the sitemap does load slow for me, it just broke 10k url's should i set vbseo to make smaller sitemaps. I have it set to 20k per sitemap.

I'm not sure if there really is a problem, but just found this weird.

There's no crawl errors listed, and the crawl stats still show average:

One more thing, when I try to fetch my site as google bot it's now giving an error also...

Sorry for posting again in the same thread but just wanted to update you that now google is downloading the sitemaps and the bot is crawling the site again.

Also, I contacted google and they responded with a link to provide my host along with the error message.

May be useful for future reference

intoDNS: tech-101.com - check DNS server and mail server health

Yes, anything network related is likely your host/firewall/network/dns/etc, not a script.