Fighting Member Profile Spam

We all know about the problem of comment spam on blogs and sites that accept comments. A lot of barriers have been placed in the way of spambots: CAPTCHAs, spam checking services like Akismet and vigilant moderation of comments.

But spammers are getting smarter and have moved their scum-of-the-earth practices to other places, like ExpressionEngine member profiles.

On EE Insider I’ve seen spammers create accounts with legitimate email addresses, activate by email and then log in and edit their profiles using the default member templates. In the member bios they add their spammy links in the hopes that the default member templates will be indexed by Google and other search engines.

Up until now I’ve been managing this problem by manually finding the spammers and zapping their accounts. Apparently, I’m not the only one having this problem. Purple Dogfish recently posted a blog entry about their problems with member profile spammers:

Reading the ExpressionEngine forums I note we’re not the only people getting hit with numerous spam registrations and loads of irrelevant linkspam. So it’s time to share what we’re doing and give Member Utilities a little plug now it’s been upgraded.

My previous entry about spammers seemed to strike a chord – in fact Member Utilities is being used to tackle spam effectively by a lot of people in the EE community (we love you all) but the behaviour of the spammers has changed so we’ve adapted Member Utilities to close the loop.

The new and improved version of Member Utilities (which I’ve purchased and installed on EE Insider) now notifies you every time someone updates their profile. This makes it easier to weed out the scumbag spammers who are trying to use your site to peddle their scams.

Read the entire write-up for details on Member Utilities and how Purple Dogfish is using it for their sites. For bonus points read the story behind why Member Utilities was created.