They are viewable by elite members and up only.
I had to do this after I had a post exchange with someone from here who copied the personal details of my forums members and registered them as members on his forum and then posted under them with help from his staff.
This guy refused to remove the fake accounts and I had to get his host involved and they removed his forum.
He copied my account to move over to his forum which was fine since he changed hosts during our exchange, but then he didn't stop there.
He copied my brother's account, my admin as well as my husband's account.
The first clue was that "VirusZero" was posting about how excited he was to get a new iPhone and that he looked forward to travelling to Sri Lanka for his sister's wedding. (Having already known VZ personally for about 6 years when this happened, pretty much set off my b.s. detector and a lot of red flags in the process.)
The second clue was when he mentioned that his friend "BDX" lived in Australia and was thinking about visiting his cousin "Mr. Nest" in the U.S. for the Summer. He said that BDX's parents thought it'd be a good idea since he was an only child and him and his cousin were close growing up and it'd be a great chance to see a place that he's never been before.
The problem with that was the fact that BDX is my brother, and at the time he was in Canada. That had been the only place outside of the U.S. he had ever been. Secondly, he was not an only child by any means. He is the second oldest for 4, right behind yours truly, and thirdly, Mr. Nest was, at that time my fiance, and he has never been out of the U.S. in the time he's been on this Earth. Fourthly, Mr. Nest is 3 years older than I am and exactly 10 years older than BDX, and so, there is no way that they could have grown up together. Lastly, we are all from NYC, and have never been to Australia, let alone Sri Lanka for that matter.
But annoyed as I was at the fake accounts, (and I was amused when he tried telling me that his brother and Mr. Nest went to college together, and moved to the U.S. after he got married) what infuriated me was what he had done to mine. As I said before, because we were on a post exchange, and he moved hosts, I gave him permission to move my account details over, such as avi and sig, profile info and posts.
I did not give him permission to post under my account, or at least, have his friend do so. To make matters worse, I saw that I had been banned once for posting porn. He informed me of this and said that he would unban me if I promised not to do it again.
The problem with this was that this was our third exchange, we had exchanges from 2 other forums of his, both of which were completed successfully and without issue. What happened was that when he moved my account over, and previous posting details, he allowed his friend to post under my account, he left most of my details the same, but he changed my gender to male and changed my location to Kuala Lumpur, and while posting a few topics and stuff, he started posting pics and video of nude actresses and other stuff like that, which he got banned for.
This guy was so caught up in impersonating people on my forum, that he actually got confused himself when he gave his friend my account info to start posting under my account, and then expected me to serve out the remainder of the other guy's probation.
Once I caught on to what was happening, I made 2 new user groups, one of which being in between 0 posters and full members. One was for the new users who joined and posted enough to become full members and the other was an elite group. Then I banned that guy from my forum when he refused to remove the fake accounts he created there and remove the stuff I didn't post under my account.
The first time I asked him, he said that he would, when all he did was change the usernames. (By then I had already bookmarked the profile links so I always had the member number.)
The second time, I asked him to remove the fake accounts, he banned me for "posting porn and disrespecting staff" neither of which I did, but he did it to cover his ass.
The third time, I got his host involved and I told them of the situation and showed them proof. They told him that he had 48 hours to remove the content, or he'd lose his forum and they told me to contact them again if nothing changed or if I needed any other help.
He put his forum in maintenance mode and unbanned my [renamed] account, but did not remove the content. When I asked him once more to remove it, to give him one last chance to do the right thing so that he wouldn't lose his forum, he banned me again, and that was when I contacted the host and they removed his forum.
After this happened he apologized to me constantly via pm on this forum, FA, and a few other ad forums and asked me if we could do another exchange, and I ignored him.
Since that happened, I have always restricted profile viewing to staff and elites only and I have always put fake info in my mini-profile. I even had to change the email address I used exclusively for forums, because the guy that was posting under my account, had used it to sign up to some questionable dating and porn sites, and even though I managed to get the accounts linked to those sites closed, the damage was already done and my email was getting flooded with spam.
From that point on, if any member wanted to see how their avatar and sig looked in their profile, I told them to use the test forum.
That is the way it is today.
