Forum admin: How to deal with SPAM?

In these 10 years since I've been running various communities, my BIGGEST ISSUE was SPAM. Those annoying bots or even humans, with nothing better to do than post their useless advertising to all kinds of shady businesses and services. I lost a community because I just couldn't handle the spam anymore and, honestly, I didn't have the 'fire' to do it anymore.

There is no script that's immune to this. Some platforms are better (they have plugins to mas delete spam or prevent this), some are not yet well 'known' (XenForo or MyBB for instance, where spam is less likely to hit you than on a Vbulletin or an IPB forum), but, the moment you have some traffic, they'll hit you.

I won't get into detail of how detrimental for your forum is, just know that you need to keep your content CLEAN and spam free, if you're interested in keeping your members.

Keeping some away from registration

Most spambots are 'using' your default registration form. ANY change in this will 'disable' some of them. So, first thing after you install your script: see how you can make the registration form a little different. This 'breaks' some of their chances to infest your board.

Captcha is something you can also use, though many seem to have 'learned' to go pass it. One thing I noticed works better is having questions and answers. If you have a forum in your native tongue (Romanian for me), it's just great. Put a question in your language and the fact most bots and spammers don't really speak it, helps cut entirely any spam. The moment I did this on my 3 Romanian forums I got ZERO Russians or whatever nationalities used to spam me to death.

Even if some pass my English questions it is clear that LESS of them can go pass my registration as compared to what used to happen when I used a simple Captcha image or nothing.

Silent spam

There is something like this. These spammers are not posting in your forums, so they're not caught by you. And you can even think they're not doing any harm. They set their homepage in the profile to their 'shady' site and that's it. Backlink from your profile page.

Why are they not OK? In time these profiles take up DATABASE space. And they don't do anything for your community. They will NEVER post in your site, so they're just using your forum to get a backling.

SOLUTION: disable links in the profile for people with under 5 posts for instance. Or disable the entire profile until they reach 5 posts. It will make MOST of them give up, since they have a lot of forums to 'hit' so, if it's not worth the hassle, they will leave you alone.

This might of course not sit well with your regular members, but 5 posts are done VERY FAST and easily, so they shouldn't mind. It takes them 10 minutes max. to access their regular member panel and this helps you see who's a spammer and who's not. And those inactives who'll never bother contribute to your forums, will at least not have won a backlink to their site.

Dealing with the 'regular' spam

So your 'friends' went past your registration form and are now ready to leave their 'junk' in your forum. Again, many are posting like monkeys, not looking at anything, just trying to leave their links.

This is where we come with another great setting: member cannot post links until they've posted 5 posts. Or 10. Or whatever number you feel like. This really helped me keep spammers at bay. They need to post 5 posts to get a link and MOST are too lazy and stupid to do so. It's easy to just come and delete their accounts, banning their IPs and emails.

Low quality posts are spam in my books

I have noticed on a webmaster forum I run that we get many Indian members who try to promte their SEO businesses or any type of site. I cannot consider them 'regular' spammers since they're not selling Viagra and they're trying to post something in the forums.

But that 'something' is too bad for my standards. I don't like 'thank you for the post' messages. I know that, when I write a meaningful article (like this one ), I'm helping you with stuff. Still I always appreciate it when people come to let me know HOW this helps them, what's their experience etc.

You will notice in time that some members are not posting anything useful. I always delete these accounts, since I'd rather have less posts than thousands of meaningless messages.

Keeping a good posting quality on your forums is mandatory if you want to grow a nice forum. Spammers don't give anything back to the community, just hinder its growth and annoy your regular members.

Hmm, that's a good find. I always say, anything that can mess up their 'flow' is good. Many are 'programmed' to hit in a certain way so anything you do to change the registration page is already messing up some of them. The biggest problem for many of us are the real spammers, people who act like regular members until they start spreading their junk