Contrib.social

Make unused profiles unavailable to anonymous users

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 4 September 2012, about 13 years ago
Updated 8 September 2025, 9 days ago

Problem/Motivation

Sometimes spammers sign up just to post links on their profile page, then they never come back.

The links posted to profile pages are then indexed by search engines, resulting in bad ratings.

Proposed resolution

Based on numerous variables, determine if a user is recently active. Then disallow anonymous access to user profile if the user has not been recently active.

Original report by killes@www.drop.org

This feature request is a bit drupal.org specific but maybe there is enough general interest to make this work.

drupal.org has existed for over 12 years, so it has a lot of users. It also has a highish page rank. This makes is a target for spammers. The more obvious ones are the shoe spammers who post comments and create forum topics. The less obvious ones are the profile spammers. They don't create any content, they just add a couple of URLs to their profiles.

Then googlebot comes and gives them link juice form d.o their website.

This is annoying by itself, but as of recently, google is complaining about spam on drupal.org and says it has taken some action. It doesn't say which action exactly and what spam it has found, but you don't want to upset google.

So, I've blocked the accounts of over 20k users over the last two days. There is more to come.

One way to make a site less attractive for this type of spam would be to disable the public user profiles after some time.

We would need to decide on the conditions:

  1. user hasn't logged in in a long time (configurable)
  2. no content produced
  3. etc

This topic is mainly to gauge interest in making this a feature for Drupal 8. If it becomes a core feature there, there would be less maintenance work on drupal.org.

Feel free to mv this to the drupalorg module if this doesn't make sense as a general feature.

✨ Feature request
Status

Postponed: needs info

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

user.module

Created by

🇩🇪Germany killes@www.drop.org

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  • Comment 9 days ago →
    🇺🇸United States smustgrave

    Thank you for sharing your idea for improving Drupal.

    We are working to decide if this proposal meets the Criteria for evaluating proposed changes. There hasn't been any discussion here for over 8 years which suggests that this has either been implemented or there is no community support. Your thoughts on this will allow a decision to be made.

    Since we need more information to move forward with this issue, the status is now Postponed (maintainer needs more info). If we don't receive additional information to help with the issue, it may be closed after three months.

    Thanks!

  • Comment 9 days ago →
    🇺🇸United States greggles Denver, Colorado, USA

    I believe this is in place today (the specifics might be slightly different, but the concept is done) so moving to fixed.

    Thanks for the idea!

  • Comment 9 days ago →
    System Message

    Now that this issue is closed, please review the contribution record.

    As a contributor, attribute any organization helped you, or if you volunteered your own time.

    Maintainers, please credit people who helped resolve this issue.

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