Suggestions and Feedback

**ADAM Web Design** · 08-20-2007, 01:23 AM

I doubt that this would ever come about (although the irony is that it's more likely to now that I posted about it, and it's what I want to prevent). But here's what I noticed:

I received a spike in Talkupation this morning due to some comments that I had made, which in itself isn't unusual. When I went to look at my CP to see who had given it to me, I noticed that it was given to me by Jamie and st0x for two anti-spam comments.

Now...I happened to accidentally click the User CP link (I was actually going to New Posts and I spasmed on the link) and noticed that, while the TP was there, both Jamie's and st0x's reasons for giving me positive TP (and their associated records were gone).

I guess what scares me about that is the idea that one person could make an initial post of some useless spammy variety and set up X number of user accounts and then go through open proxies to inflate the TP and possibly confuse others into thinking spammer X is a useful member.

Is there anything within vBulletin to prevent against this? I realize it's probably a lightning in a bottle scenario, but experience has taught me to anticipate and head off all stupidity before it can actually happen.

**Moxxnixx** · 08-20-2007, 02:45 AM

Hi Adam. Interesting theory. That sounds to be much more effort than it's worth, doesn't it? The posting limitations set on TP would mean that the spammer would have to do an awful lot of posting in each extra account.
...or am I missing something?

**CSS4Life** · 08-20-2007, 05:47 AM

I've long wondered about this and in my post here: http://www.webmaster-talk.com/sugges...il-blocks.html, I tried to reason that there should be email blocks on users signing up with the same email address several times. I don't know if anything came of this, bu it would certainly make it much more difficult to exploit this TP loophole.

It would be possible I expect to give new users a TP of 9 or something so they can't give or take TP until they've received some themselves. The only problem with this is that it means genuine new members can't take TP from spammers etc.

**ADAM Web Design** · 08-20-2007, 11:08 AM

I don't know if I'd have a problem with that, whym...let the new members earn the right to receive TP from people. That weeds out the good from the crappy.

**ForrestCroce** · 08-22-2007, 03:00 AM

I think this has already happened with the TV addicts. Luckily talkupation doesn't have a dollar value, so the main reason for multiple accounts would be spam. That's obvious, and not tolerated ... thanks in large part to you and Jamie Lewis.