One of our clients recently installed vBulletin and has seen a fair amount of spammer registration on their site even with image verification, email confirmation, and new user moderation. In the last couple of days we have noticed newly registered users, but not approved, send private messages to spam other members of the site. In investigating how to prevent this I learned something new that I think is not made as obvious as it should be by vBulletin.

To insure that private messaging disabled for a usergroup (ie - users awaiting confirmation email or awaiting moderation) there isn't a master switch turning off the feature for the usergroup. You have to change the "Maximum Store Messages" to 0 for the usergroup when editing the Private Message Permissions for a usergroup.

In this section set "Maximum Stored Messages" to 0



Frankly, as an administrator, I would like to see Jelsoft change it so that there is a master "Yes/No" setting for whether or not private messaging is enabled for the group. Unless you look closely Maximum Stored Messages doesn't look like that switch even though it is used that way.

Keep you spam and moderation to a minimum by checking your usergroup settings for the proper maximum store messages setting.

I'm not sure if this is the best way to manage it but on my site a user cannot send a PM unless they have at least 15 post.

I think that is a good solution as well. This also has the beneficial side effect of getting them to be more active on the site.

Thanks!

Mark

__________________
Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Turning Passion into Profit

I use this to prevent spammers from registering.
NoSpam! for vBulletin 3.7 - vBulletin.org Forum

If they dont know about the subject of your site, they wont know the answer to the question. :)
You can use multiple answers so almost anything related will let them register.

I think it works great.!!

Also i only allow people to send a PM, once per 5 min to one person at a time. (unless they are a registered member, or better)

That's a nice mod. I have 3.8 so it doesn't look like this one would work on my site. Do you know if there is one for 3.8?

This mod works fine on 3.8x :)