Add-on Review: Member Utilities
Posted in Add-on Reviews
Just a quick blog post as a public service announcement. Recently I have begun culling all of the bogus users from our member list as I hate being used for link bait. For those of you that have never experienced this it is quit a frustrating experience. It is the act of a human (no bots here) that registers on your website. They wait a few weeks and then they come back and put a bunch of links in their bio. Now I am all for allowing people to promote their legitimate businesses but when I see 5 links in a bio and they are all for something different. Or if there is even 1 that I know is ACAI or WEIGHTLOSS link then they are probably going in the trash as well.
Fortunately I have recently been informed of a Member Utilities which is a module that ties into the ExpressionEngine membership capabilities and notifies you of any changes your members make. So if bobfrodo1967 (names changed to protect the innocent) makes a change to his account it emails the specified people with all of the pertinent information like user number, user name, email address, IP Address (so you can tell if they are coming from a single person and ban repeat offenders) and their bio so you can see what they have added.
Member Utilities has allowed us to remove about 100 users from our site in the last week. Fabulous stuff. Especially for sites with large memberships. For $15 it is a steal. So thank you Greg from Purple Dogfish for an awesome addition to ExpressionEngine!
*Free Tip: disabling your membership list from being viewed will probably dissuade a few of the smarter spammers. To do this go to admin-> members and groups -> member groups. Select the edit group for the group in question (I would do everyone except Super Admins).
On the left hand navigation select Member Account Privileges. From here you will have to make some decisions based on the type of site that you run. But for my purposes I have no need for members to see or contact each other so I set most of these to no. But at least set Can view public profiles and Include Members in Site’s Member List to no. This concludes our public service announcement.
Oh. and I hate to do this but comments are being moderated as well…
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