Banned ?

I honestly don't know why people want their accounts closed, I would just vanish :confused:

However I will make the point that once you have joined and posted the links must remain intact................ relational databases are very unforgiving in that respect ;)

Yes, that, and it can really mess up the flow of discussions.

Exactly. I also serves a purpose - that is, letting current or new members know what is and what is not an acceptable post. If a post is really out of order then the individual post can always be deleted.

Well generally the posts that get someone banned are removed. But if they have other posts that are considered to be fine, then they're left on the forum. 99% of all the banned users across our 30 forums are spammers. I ban 10 or 12 per day on all of our 30 forums, or rather, intercept that many. I get an email when new members signup. very often I can spot a spammer before they post, and I don't give them the chance to.

Spammers are a right nuisence. I'd say 70% of the guestbook comments I get are spam, but because they're hosted on the guestbook server, SEVENtwentyfour can't routinely pick them up and do anything about them. Once my subscription runs out I doubt I'll renew it unless the can find a way of addressing the problem.

Well the 1st step is the CAPCHA system (image verification). that will eliminate most bots, unless of course a human registers them (or they buy HUGELY expensive image-text recognition software). I've just implemented it on the contact us links on all our forums, and it's stopped the spamming via that link, dead in it's tracks. I haven't gotten a single one, since.

Oh yes, the basic image verification is there ... but this doesn't stop these tenacious guestbook posters. If the site checkers could run bots over the guestbook in the way they do the site, it would be easily controlled - but they can't of course.

Ah so you have a problem with the career spammers as we do on our forums. Well I dunno who is spamming you obviously, but on our forums 98% of the spam comes from India, Nigeria, Russia and China. If that traffic isn't important to you, you can block entire nations and reduce the spam immeasurably. We can't do that, however.

JPnyc I suppose it might be possible to block entire nations with a php script so they didn't see the link to the guestbook from the site, but I don't know how I'd go about it. I do know how to block IP addresses but not how to tie them up with nationalities or whether a similar php script could be used to block domains.

There's no way to block stuff on the guestbook at all - that would take their cooperation and at the moment it's open to anyone. All I can do is be notified immediately there's a post and delete it if it turns out to be spam.

I think you can do it with .htaccess

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/77619