Posting now permitted by registered users only

[StarSeeker]

What surprises me is that anyone would even leave a forum open for posting to non-registered to begin with, anymore...

*sighs* If only there were less morons in the world we admins could get away with it...

[dvr]

I think it's a good idea. We have run into problems with spam and pornbots at one of my other forums and found it needful to occasionaly run through the members list and delete leechers and abusers. A well maintained forum is a healthy, safe forum that is useful to all its members.
I hope using image verification codes wont become nessecary in the future but it may be a good idea to incorporate them as part of the new member application process.

[rra]

since we have the new phpBB forum it seems we now have bot-users:

this is a sample of the list of actiuve users of April 15:


Registered users: Andy74, ElChristou, Google [Bot], Majestic-12 [Bot], MSN [Bot], Yahoo [Bot]
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

Is there something to block these users ??


Ren?

[ElChristou]

since we have the new phpBB forum it seems we now have bot-users:

this is a sample of the list of actiuve users of April 15:


Registered users: Andy74, ElChristou, Google [Bot], Majestic-12 [Bot], MSN [Bot], Yahoo [Bot]
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

Is there something to block these users ??

Those (apart Andy74 and I) are indexing bots for search engines; seems they are not anymore invisible in phpbb3...

[ElChristou]

since we have the new phpBB forum it seems we now have bot-users:

this is a sample of the list of actiuve users of April 15:


Registered users: Andy74, ElChristou, Google [Bot], Majestic-12 [Bot], MSN [Bot], Yahoo [Bot]
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

Is there something to block these users ??


Ren?

[chris]

since we have the new phpBB forum it seems we now have bot-users:

this is a sample of the list of actiuve users of April 15:


Registered users: Andy74, ElChristou, Google [Bot], Majestic-12 [Bot], MSN [Bot], Yahoo [Bot]
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

Is there something to block these users ??


Ren?

The bot users have always been there, but under phpbb2 they just showed up as guest users. I don't think that they should be blocked: having the forum indexed by search engines is quite useful. One thing I do plan on doing is providing a stripped down theme that will be shown to bots. This will cut down on bandwidth drain from them.

--Chris

[John Van Vliet]

edit 5:34 pm

[LordFerret]

If I might throw 2-cents in here...

I'd mentioned this quite some time ago. I'm an administrator on another forums, an online gaming community, widely known with currently a #1 Georanked gameserver (1 of 3). We have mostly under-age minors in the forums. We used to have a terrible problem with spam posts of all kinds, the worst being porn advertisements and even porn images. We now allow posting by registered users only. On top of that, among other things like visual confirmation, we use anti-spam verification; The user attempting to register must use a valid email address which is sent to an anti-spam verification service, and if the email address fails validation their registration is denied (no confirmation email is sent). Those that get through this firewall are humans making the posts, which (if they're spamming or posting porn) we can now track back to the email provider and report and block them - informing as well the verification service. We've had 0 (zero) porn posts since installing this last fall, and only 1 (one) advertising post by a human. By the way, the conventions we use do not affect things like Googlebot. In another related issue are registered users who violate terms of service in harassing others and making inappropriate posts... deleting their account is no help as they return under another name and new email address (Gmail for example), coming in as well via a proxied-IP. We're currently looking into yet another addon which denies account registrations from IP addresses which do not resolve.

[LordFerret]

since we have the new phpBB forum it seems we now have bot-users:

this is a sample of the list of actiuve users of April 15:


Registered users: Andy74, ElChristou, Google [Bot], Majestic-12 [Bot], MSN [Bot], Yahoo [Bot]
Legend: Administrators, Global moderators

Is there something to block these users ??


Ren?

The bot users have always been there, but under phpbb2 they just showed up as guest users. I don't think that they should be blocked: having the forum indexed by search engines is quite useful. One thing I do plan on doing is providing a stripped down theme that will be shown to bots. This will cut down on bandwidth drain from them.

--Chris

Would this be the html robots meta commands having to do with 'no index' and 'no follow' ?
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61050
I understand that you can limit indexing of content amount with this.

And yes Ren?, you want to allow search engines to index your site - otherwise it can't be found!