I remember here was a topic about how to make bot registrations useless by hiding the data from their profiles, but I really can't afford finding it.

Yet, I'd like to name few solutions that can be rated as "neutral" toward user's rights. They are mainly about making the content of memberlist.php useless or inaccessible by bots. Why this file? It offers a list of all users, their profiles and thus:

* Links to the webpages
* Links to the icq profiles (which contain further crap too)
* Specific keywords

This list is the only place where the data from users who don't have posts in the public part of the forum is accessible. If someone registered, he'll post sooner or later, at least one hello and little-get-to-know-each-other stuff. Thus, the primary target ARE exactly the very potential bots.

Other users, who have at least one post in the public part of the forum (assumed that it is not spam) will have their profiles visible. (more or less, dependent on posting quota, which is as well fair imo)

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To hide members.php implicitly, via .

This should prevent bots to get memberlist.php. The bots will *know* it is there but as well that they *should not* read it.

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To hide members.php explicitly from all guests (so bots too), by editing the forum source.

Link to memberlist will be visible to anyone logged in, but any guest will have to type the link explicitly in order to visit it.

I remember there was a very short solution for this. It was about row-two of code on the right place. If you like it, I may bother to remember how it was working.

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Hiding data

If hiding memberlist.php isn't enough, you can as well do some modifications/restrictions in the includes/usercp_viewprofile.php , where you can edit the way the profiles are being displayed.

You can, in example, make that profiles of users with 0 posts don't display at all, or filter the data in their profiles in many ways.
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