vBulletin Forum - Tips, tricks and advice for a vBulletin rookie

Webmaster Discussion
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#1

Hi guys,

We recently started to work on a forum for our fans & members. However I have no experience what-so-ever with vBulletin.

Bjorn shared some advice on ICQ but I wanted to start a thread here to get more insight into this forum platform.

Main questions are what plugins should I use, how do I protect from spam, if there is anything I should be careful or look after and so on. General advice and tips for running a vBulletin forum. The main thing I’m worried about is spam & hacking attempts so any advice there would be useful.

So far we have this: http://forum.staxus.com - any advice what-so-ever is very much welcome!

Thank you very much for your help!
Andrei

#2

Re: vBulletin Forum - Tips, tricks and advice for a vBulletin rookie

The spam plugins I mentioned to you used to be much better at catching bots / spammers. Not sure if it’s because vbulletin 5 is about to be released but they seem to be worse and stop less spam now.

My main tip would be to setup two user groups:

Group 1 - New Signups

  • Any new posts that contains links are held in moderation queue
  • Cannot send any Private Messages

Group 2 - Full Members

  • Can post links in threads
  • Can send private messages

You then setup a filter (Usergroups -> Promotions) so that users gets automatically promoted to Group 2 after they made X amount of posts. I think we have it setup to 3 posts here.

#3

Re: vBulletin Forum - Tips, tricks and advice for a vBulletin rookie

Bjorn - interesting spam is such a problem for you. I’ve had a few periods where spam was briefly a problem, but generally I never have an issue with it. Maybe the reason why is because on the join form I have a question - “BB is short for what word?” That stops bots and non-English speaking spammers who have no clue what the site is about.

My big problem is email addresses that go bad and the fact that I had the default set to notification via email when there are new posts on a thread that someone has contributed to previously. A programmer is having to write something rather complicated to fix all the bad emails for me.

I don’t really use much in the way of plugins. There’s a rotating banner ad plugin I use, but I want to replace that with my own banner ad rotating script.

#4

Re: vBulletin Forum - Tips, tricks and advice for a vBulletin rookie

Thank you for your tips! Bjorn was already of great help.

However regarding the question at signup - Bjorn already suggested this. Problem is I want to have the forum in German & French as well. Not sure if all French guys will understand “BB is short for what word” since Bareback is “Sans capote” in French :smiley: