Just a quick note.... I have been allowing in lots of people as I have been getting quite a bit of new traffic from searches for their username - EG Smaxor searches send me a few people every day to his profile page.

With that tactic comes some risk of course and so today I came across a polish forum where someone had posted the fact that being a member at my forum was a good way to get a pharms backlink... time to act

If you edit the Profile.template.

php

  to add a nofollow on the link it should slow them down a little

Something like this: -

So what you're saying, is that Mr. Luvs Viagrastein and Ms. Cialis Purchase are NOT REAL members on my board? 

Those are me, Perk.  Just a little cloaking to prevent ......

Good idea

For one of my other forums which apparently either got on an XRumer list or some other sort of 'go here to spam' - I put a spam filter on it, that worked fine, but caused some registration issues   So - I changed to VBulletin.  Perfect now.  I like SMF a lot, but VB is pretty nice as well and (I think) a bit harder for spam-bots to seek and destroy.

People spam forums for 2 reasons...

They want profile spam linked to their site (I no follow my profile links)
They do post spam in new threads - easy to sort with moderation

Personally i let anyone in and then kill the bots if they cause issues

Don't forget sig links...

=RT=

yes but a sig link requires a post in a thread

for SMF forums, I always keep signature links out of it as well as using blacklists.

How do you use a profile to do anything without siggy links?