Members referring people away

Have you ever had a member sign up, post genuinely only to begin PMing your members asking them to register on there own forum, maybe after a being told off for doing something against the rules etc?

 

Yes. In fact, that's happened here a few times - never fun to deal with.

 

We once had a moderator who took a huff after we demoted him for constantly going against the moderation rules and he spammed everyone asking them to sign up to his really badly done phpbb board

 

Yes, I have had people do that and it really unnerves me.

I usually add them to the miserable users group, or add their ip to the miserable users config. If you dont know what miserable users is, its a modification by PaulM over at vbulletin.org - go look it up.

Or, I just ban them.

One guy a few weeks ago was in the chat room talking about starting his own site and telling people about it. I joined the chat room and said "say good bye <his name>". He replied back "huh?" I said say "good bye, 1, 2, 3" - kicked him out of chat and banned him from chat. Then edited his profile and added him to the banned members group.

It pisses me off when I spend so much time building the forum, building content and people try to profit from my work.

 

I haven't caught anyone doing that by PM on my own forums, but I did receive a "poaching" PM on someone else's forum and promptly told the owner. Seems one of the mods was actually a mod on a rival board as well, but had promised not to let it interfere. So, it caused some turmoil, but the owner was very appreciative.

 

I've had this happen before, and I simply ban any users that do this. Usually, any forum advertised this way is pretty much destined to fail anyway.