Like so many websites which are as popular as GPanswers.com, we suffer from people trying to take advantage of our web presence for their own selfish ends.

I have spent the last week removing many members from the forum whose intentions were clearly only to promote their own websites, typically the greyer side of the internet selling smut, drugs and gambling in roughly equal measure.

These spammers are simply registering, not posting anything (to lay low) and relying on search engines crawling through the memberlist to spot their weblink and get them some PageRank (TM) or whatever.

This diverts from the purpose of GPanswers, which is all about you people - the systems administrators who want to find out about Group Policy, share your knowledge and experiences with other like-minded people!

So, a few rules of thumb so we can spend more time on the good stuff and less on this kind of thing:
1) any member with no posts who links to something we deem completely off-topic and likely to offend or be illegal is likely to be removed without warning

2) if you want to link to your own website that's fine - that might be a personal homepage or the firm you work for, or even just your second favourite site (GPanswers being first, of course :smile

3) BUT if you have zero posts and you link to a website I'm likely to err on the side of caution and remove the weblink (though not the member) if I have any doubt at all. 404's cause me doubt, by the way.

The more people who 'look like' spammers the more time I have to spend working out which is which. If you are contributing to the site (asking or answering, we don't mind), then your links are far more likely to be left alone.

Thanks for your help with this, if it makes it easier to see the wood for the trees then I can spend more time making the site better for the real members. I welcome any comments on this issue, of course, through the usual wishlist / comments section here:
GPanswers.com wishlist

Adam Vero
Site Admin