How to Properly Monitor Your Forum for Spammers
Forums are often targets of unethical SEO tactics! An unethical SEO company will sell services like Xrumor which will provide robotic-like automated scripts that will join a message board and create new topics and replies with advertising and often commercial links embedded in the content. The idea behind using this unethical method is to create links so that the offending website will rank higher in search engines. This is actually cheating in search engine optimization (SEO) and many big search engines, like Google, will penalize websites that do this if they are found to be doing so. This type of spam is a common problem forum owners deal with and many owners will stop running forums altogether because of it. There are many ways to combat and monitor spam in a forum so that forum owners can enjoy building their online community without the headache of spam.
Forget CAPTCHA, go with Q&A
Anti-spam services like CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA have been broken for many years. They do not prevent most spammers from joining message boards. There are services around the world that will charge $1 to solve over 1,000 CAPTCHA codes for bot spam scripts to go through registration and forum posting. There also doesn’t seem to be a solution or really a future for CAPTCHA methods. Instead of using something that has been proven not to work, use something that does work. Questions and answers when registering and posting. You configure the questions and answers and the poster/guest must answer them correctly before they can participate and/or join the forum. Stay away from math questions because scripts are basically like computers, and computers are pretty good at math. Instead, use somewhat difficult questions that relate to the main topic (or niche) of your message board. This alone will prevent over 90% of spammers from even registering on your forum in the first place.
Define what spam means to you
Spam is not just links that are not allowed in a forum! There are many forum owners with many different definitions of spam on their forums. Some see spam as posting content that is off topic or makes no sense, like gibberish and the like. Some see spam as posting links that directly compete with the main forum niche or are forum rivals. Others define spam as commercial and non-commercial advertising that is posted on your forum without permission. It is up to you to define what is included as spam in your own forum. You should also set it to public and simply add rules against it so that human members can see what is not allowed on your forum. A human spammer is likely to bypass your anti-spam applications when registering. A bot won’t because it won’t look for the answer, it will move on to its next victim. Therefore, you need to make sure that you define what spam means in your forum for your members so that they know what not to post on it.
Deal with spam
Spam can harm a community if it is published successfully! You must ensure that you are strict in adhering to your rules and regulations regarding spam on your forum. You should delete any spam you see in sight and you should inform the forum staff (if you have any) to do the same as well. It is always recommended to have a second member of the forum staff (such as a moderator) to help keep the forum free from spam and other violations of its rules. Spam bots that come to your forum should be banned on sight because they are not human beings and will not listen to your warnings. Human spammers should at least be warned and if they continue, they should be banned from the forum. The less spam you have to deal with, the better your forum will be and the more fun it will be to run. So don’t let spam get you down, fight it with the easy methods provided and think about making your forum active and successful!
