vBulletin vs SMF?

[Maxine]

A client of mine is having tons of problems with spammers on their phpBB board. (We had some hacking problems too, but now we update/patch their forum software for them instead of relying on them to do it.) We have implemented many anti-spammer features on the forum but still get tons of people with incomplete registrations showing up with profiles and rude names (as attempts to gain links for Google Page Rank purposes.)

Anyway, I am now looking at converting the client's phpBB to either SMF or vBulletin.

Can anyone tell me how good vBulletin is at preventing spammers (and specifically preventing the putting up of profiles, etc. without completing their registration - so they'd HAVE TO use a real email address and confirm it before their name or any of their info shows up on the board). Also, how good is vBulletin at preventing hacks to the server?

If anyone has Simple Machines Forum (SMF) experience too, please feel free to comment on how they fare as well.

Finally, two quick questions about features:
- which forum is best for Search Engine Friendliness
- my client's need to moderate the boards without having access to the full admin (don't want them to mess anything up :o) but they will need to be able to fully moderate the users (ban, delete, etc.) as well as moderate the actual posts. Will vBulletin handle this type of mini-admin well?

Thanks in advance,
Maxine

[orban]

Can anyone tell me how good vBulletin is at preventing spammers (and specifically preventing the putting up of profiles, etc. without completing their registration - so they'd HAVE TO use a real email address and confirm it before their name or any of their info shows up on the board).

I'd LOVE to see that implemented. It shows "Users Awaiting Email Confirmation", not quite sure if it shows "Users that need Moderation".

[renep]

Can anyone tell me how good vBulletin is at preventing spammers (and specifically preventing the putting up of profiles, etc. without completing their registration - so they'd HAVE TO use a real email address and confirm it before their name or any of their info shows up on the board).
You can enable image verification (captcha) for registration. So far it seems to work fine in keeping automated spam scripts out of the door.

Requiring a real e-mail address doesn't solve anything IMO, since spammers will simply use real addresses. Before image verification was introduced in 3.6 I've seen lots of spam accounts that had clicked the link in the verification e-mail.

Also, how good is vBulletin at preventing hacks to the server?That's not really up to vB. Keep your Apache, PHP etc. up to date.

which forum is best for Search Engine FriendlinessvB is more or less SE friendly.

Except for one strange quirk: vB abuses rel="nofollow" for things it's not intended for and doesn't apply it to links it is intended for. SE's might punish that silly behavior at some point. It's really weird and I don't understand why vB does that.

my client's need to moderate the boards without having access to the full admin (don't want them to mess anything up :o) but they will need to be able to fully moderate the users (ban, delete, etc.) as well as moderate the actual posts. Will vBulletin handle this type of mini-admin well?vB has a inline moderation functions and a moderator control panel for this purpose. I know it handles moderation of threads and posts really well. I don't know about users though.

[Zachery]

Image Verification has been in vBulletin since at least the 3.0 serries.

[renep]

Image Verification has been in vBulletin since at least the 3.0 serries.
Right, sorry. 3.6 added image verification for anonymous replies. I confused that with registration.

[RS_Jelle]

Except for one strange quirk: vB abuses rel="nofollow" for things it's not intended for and doesn't apply it to links it is intended for. SE's might punish that silly behavior at some point. It's really weird and I don't understand why vB does that.
Can you explain this a bit more? In my eyes you can't really "abuse" rel nofollow, it's just to indicate to follow or not to follow a link, nothing to abuse :)

I just took a look at the rel nofollow tags in vBulletin and I don't see something special about them (or I'm missing something). They're just for the search.php, ... links (the usual stuff which isn't interesting for a SE).

Sorry for going offtopic, but I'm really interested in this :D

[renep]

Can you explain this a bit more? In my eyes you can't really "abuse" rel nofollow, it's just to indicate to follow or not to follow a link, nothing to abuse :)
It has already been discussed in this thread (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=189613). I'm with AlexMack and joeychgo in this discussion. Nofollow doesn't mean "don't follow", it means "don't credit" (in terms of pagerank and such).

rel=nofollow is intended to not credit (external) links that are not placed by the webmaster. If I were Google, and I saw a site not crediting its own internal links, I'd consider that a sure sign of pagerank manipulation and I'd penalize that site. I have no prove that Google is doing that at the moment, nor that it ever will, but this is what I expect to happen at some point in the future. The way things work at present, all vB forums would be penalized when that happens.

Also, vB doesn't actually use the feature where it's most wanted to discourage link spamming: on the link in the profile, on links in signatures, in posts and so on.

If some people want to use rel=nofollow in the way vB currently does, that's fine with me. But I don't understand why this misbehaviour is the default. In fact it's not even an option. If you want to sanitize rel=nofollow to comply with its intentions, you have to customize a lot of templates.

[RS_Jelle]

Thanks, I'm going to kick that other topic :)

[PassMark.com]

We had the same spaming problem with PHPBB. Rather than re-writing PHPBB ourselves we switched our two forums over to vB. You can see them here,

Zoom Search Engine Support Forum (http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/)
PassMark Software Forum (http://www.passmark.com/forum/)

It has cut down the spam by about 95%. Saving us a lot of time, and paying for the cost of vB.

Make sure you use the 404.php script to redirect your old links.

We were reasonable well indexed by Google with PHPBB and after a couple of weeks we are starting to see the new links to vB pages appear in Google.

[Qryztufre]

I'm a co-admin on a vB board and the majority of the spammers we got were real people (bypassing the image verification).

We ended up simply banning the email addresses of the spammers (specifically @cashette.com) it got rid of 95% of them...

There is some list someplace, and it's seemingly impossible to get your site off that list *sigh*...

All in all though, VB seems to offer the best resistance against spam that I've seen on the various BB's I've been a member of.
Q

[thedesperates]

vB is more or less SE friendly.

Except for one strange quirk: vB abuses rel="nofollow" for things it's not intended for and doesn't apply it to links it is intended for. SE's might punish that silly behavior at some point. It's really weird and I don't understand why vB does that.

lie.

SMF uses an url-rewrite engine, vB don't use it (it's compatible only with apache, bla bla bla)

the nofollow it's the minor thing to care when you use ugly urls


if you want a SE-friendly forum you can still use vB+vBSEO for abot 300 USD (or SMF for about 0 USD):p