I noticed that a particular member who registered not to long ago has been online for over an hour in total, and often logs on some random day and reads some threads but does not reply. Today I saw them looking at a member's profile, I suspect they might be harvesting e-mails to spam. Anyone have any tips to detect if they're a spammer or not, or a legitimate user who just doesn't want to reply? I looked at the IPs and the registration IP is different than the current one, and the current one does not resolve to anything so that made me even more suspicious. As for their e-mail, it's hotmail.
Setup a handfull of boobytrap accounts and monitor the email addresses attached to them as well as any private messaging system you might have.
Wow are you serious or is this a joke? You need to read up on what it takes to manage an online community.... Just because a registered member doesn't post doesn't make him/her a spammer!!!!
well , send the user a courtesy mail / pm and try to understand his nature from the reply . if you do not get the response in reasonable time & if you see the user again on the forums then suspend / ban the user ...
If you are worried you could set up fake accounts and watch them, I did this when I was worried about a user on my forum. However, I agree with giorgiormani that they might not be a spammer.
Thats a good idea. Something that starts with A that posts once every month or two (pointless oneliners to bump threads you like) I've gotten several spammers this way. It also helps if the false member is online...log them in when you'll be away for a little while. _________________________ Though what the other members have said is likely true. Many people LURK, and many people read profiles. If you assume that every member that does not post is doing something bad, then heh, disable new accounts
Why are your members able to see other members email addresses? This information should not be visible to anyone but moderators and administrators. When a member looks at another members profile, they should not be able to see any personal data. This includes email address and IP address. Even though the email address being viewable is the default setting with the SMF forum software, you should have changed that when the forum was set up. I have members that log into my forum, read through it and never post anything. Some of my members have been doing this for over a year. That is just the way a forum works. You have the people that post, you have the people that read and the have people that do both.
I'm aware that some people just lurk the forum, but you can usually tell who's a "real" user and who's not. @ giorgioarmani, I'm serious. This is why I was suspicious of this particular user: 1) A way too common name, without any numbers or anything. 2) A weird e-mail address 3) They looked at profiles too much, a regular user usually doesn't do that much. As for harvesting e-mails, by default you can only use the e-mail a member function, so what I meant to say is that I feared that they were abusing that function. However I'm going to disable that for regular members as they should be using PMs to contact another member, not the e-mail function. Also, this particular person just made another account after I changed their password on their first account. They didn't use the password recovery feature, so I'm probably going to PM them or just ban them as I doubt it's a legitimate user. And as stated before the IP address, it doesn't seem to resolve to a ISP.
this should be enough evidence to ban the user ! if you do not get response to the PM in a reasonable time then it could be a bot collecting the members details