Forum spam from the search engines?

I'm the admin of a poker forum using phpBB2. I get robot spam on my forums regularly, usually from p*rn sites or credit loans stuff. These "members" sign up with a website in their profile, thus creating an easy one-way link back to their site. From what I understand this is mostly done by robots because the info and username doesn't always make sense.

Here's my question: Why am I also getting a lot of member sign ups with search engines as the website in their profile? The profiles are linking to google, msn and yahoo. What robots are doing that and how would anyone benefit from it? It just seems strange to me...

ust to make it very clear, I'm not asking how to prevent this from happening. I already have captcha verification and I can delete users with one click so that's not a big problem. I'm trying to understand who benefits from a one-way link back to the search engines.

 

I don't understand this. If you have have captcha verification installed how could those bots can register in your forum? they are so smart to understand captcha?

 

I can't be sure that it's not just people spamming the site, but I tend to think they're mostly robots because of the info they put in their profile. Sometimes they use part of the URL for the username or weird things like that.

Anyway that's not really my concern. Whether it's a robot or a human, who benefits from a backlink to google.com?

Do you think it might be the spiders who leave this profile when they crawl? This seems unlikely to me since they have usernames like Hockey and other arbitrary words, but I don't have a better answer.

 

Spam bots create links in profiles to legimit sites to make them look real. As for PHPBB2, I had many problem with it to the point where it was senseless to spend most of my time deleting spam profiles/posts. PHPBB3 is out since mid December and I have had not a single problem. Sooner or later you'll upgrade your forum version, it's better sooner than later.

 

Have you tried using SMF forum software? I believe it's more secure and safe from SPAM.

 

Thanks sportiana. Perhaps that's all there is to it.

 

Yes. There are a number of bot programs that do auto signups and they defeat captcha on software such as phpbb, smf, and even VB.