Preventing users from favoriting the forum

[WildMan]

I'd like to be able to set my forum so that people can't favorite the forum and would, instead, have to click on the link on our web site.  I get hundreds of spammers every day and I figure that if they couldn't go directly to the forum, that would cut down on spambots.  Also, any spammers that do click on the link on our web site would, at least, count as a unique visitor to our site.

I tried renaming the forum directory but, or course, that raised all kinds of trouble.  I've looked for a mod that could accomplish this but I don't see anything like that.  Is there a way to accomplish this easily?  I'm using SMF 1.1.16

[busterone]

What purpose would this serve? It will NOT slow down spammers whatsoever.
You would be better served by looking into installing one or more of the ant-spam modifications available here.
If you were using 2.0, then the built in anti spam verification questions works well at stopping the bots from registering. There is a 1.1.x version modification that does the same thing.
Human spammers are a different thing of course.  There are several mods that will aid in preventing them from registering on the mod site.

[WildMan]

Well, if they had to go to our web site in order to get to the forum, then that would add a whole lot of unique visitors on our web site.  If someone goes directly to our forum, it's not counting as a unique visitor.  If there's some steps to get to the forum, the spambot may not be able to navigate that (it may not be worth messing with) and even if they do, I get a better page rank so the spammers serve some useful purpose.