jono.me

Fighting forum spam

// June 3rd, 2011 // 1 Comment » // australianwebmaster.com

australianwebmaster.com is still challenging me.

The last lot of changes I made to regain control haven’t really had the desired result and it got to the point where I questioned whether I had the time to take up the fight.

Fortunately a member offered to help out and the fight back has begun.

The obvious spam has always been under control using a number of anti-spam mods that detect new members dropping links, etc however they don’t address the poor quality “me too” and “thanks for the advice” style posts which really made the site look trashy.

There have been a couple of major changes recently.

Firstly there is a much stricter stance on post quality. If the post doesn’t add value it’s gone and the member gets an infraction.

Another change is that I have added the vbStopForumSpam vBulletin mod which will check all registrations against a massive list of almost 4 million reported spammers. This is done by using the StopForumSpam system which allows forum owners to report forum spammers. The mod now checks this list for all registrations and also allow me to submit spammers to this database. It blocks 100s of sign ups each day. It remains to be seen if it blocks legitimate users.

The other major change is that I made the site NOFOLLOW for all external links. Not a major fan of this change however hopefully members will understand that it’s necessary and that there is more to a forum than just getting back links. I do have a whitelist for certain members and supporters.

The above changes are likely to have a massive effect on my traffic however quality beats quantity.

Regaining control of forum

// February 24th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // australianwebmaster.com

As I mentioned in my previous post, statistically my australianwebmaster.com forum was going really well, however diving in to the statistics showed a different story.

For me the goal was always to increase post activity. During the building stage I always aimed for each area of the forum to have a “last post” either showing Today or Yesterday. After a while the site activity built and I had met this goal – in fact I was receiving up to 200 posts a day. The problem was that many of these posts were of low quality.

This meant that the people I actually WANT on the forum were frustrated by the crappy posts and simply gave up. This is not what I wanted.

To solve the problem I had to make the site less appealing to people just wanting backlinks. I figured I could either make external links nofollow or remove signatures.

I didn’t like the idea of making the site a nofollow so all I could do was remove signatures, however I decided to provide users with a backlink on their web site as listed on the profile. I felt that this was a good compromise – I could limit links to 1 per user. Also showing their link wasn’t too complicated so it was fairly straight forward to change.

As soon as I announced the changes I had a few people come back and state that they thought the change was a great idea and confirmed that the reason why the no longer visited the forum was because of the low quality posts. So I was happy.

I did however then get a few negative comments.

I decided to re-instate signatures however only for people who were contributing to the forum.

The problem is how do you do this. Any system that relies on post count is encouraging people to make posts – and this generally means low quality posts. Post length was also not appropriate – I have people quoting other web sites (eg. articles) which were nice and long however doesn’t mean that they were a “quality” post.

The solution I’ve implemented for now is to make people apply for a signature. Not too sure how it will go but I think it’s worth a try.

2010 Review of australianwebmaster.com

// February 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

A web site is a bit like a child who’s growing up – looking at them every day you don’t really notice the changes however when you compare a photo taken 12 months apart the changes are clear.

I recently sat down to look at the statistics of australianwebmaster.com. Thanks to Google Analytics it’s quite easy to compare the site over the 12 months and analyse where the improvements have been and try to see where the site is heading.

Lately I’ve noticed a high number of members logging in each day and quite a lot of activity. As a forum owner this is what you want to see and although I wasn’t spending as much time on the site as I normally do I felt that the site must be working well.

Going through the statistics has given me a different perspective. I’m certainly glad I went through the exercise because it has made something very clear to me and changed my entire way of thinking about the site.

Firstly the good news – all the statistics were positive, meaning that everything had improved:
Visits – +26.59%
Unique vistors – +38.52%
Pageviews – +33.02%

Compared to previous years this growth is quite poor however as long as there is growth I’m satisfied – I would have liked to see bigger growth however 2010 was probably the least active I had been on the site so it probably reflects that.

Now the bad news was the country of origin for my visitors. Compared to 2009, my Australian visitors had declined by 15.5% but vistors from India had more than doubled. Australia was still the highest, but only just (less than 1%).

If the forum was a global site then this isn’t an issue, however as the site is AUSTRALIANwebmaster.com this was an issue and I had to do something. So I had to decide what was important to the site – high activity but with low quality costs, or lower activity with higher quality posts.

I will detail what I’ve done in another post.

For the record, at the moment the forum stats are:
Threads: 4,780, Posts: 30,488, Members: 8,628

Duplicate Content

// February 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

Matt Cutts recently announced a Google Algorithm change launch that aims to “drive down spam levels” by devaluing content of sites that republish content and have “low levels of original content”.

Content re-publication is a big issue for content developers, particularly bloggers. There is nothing more frustrating than taking the time to research and write a post to only find it appearing on someone else’s site – often with no credit (even with credit I personally still feel ripped off!).

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also wrote about the change in an article, Do You Republish Other People’s Content? You’ll Want to Read This. Commenters on the post were united in welcoming the change however like most of what Google does there seems to be more questions then answers.

For example how does Google determine something has been republished? If a site publishes an article it’s only the main body of the page that duplicates – the header, footer, side-bar, comments, etc will all be different still. Google would need to have a threshold where it’s deemed to be a copy – could this incorrectly penalise a site quoting content?

Another important question is how does Google know who the original publisher was? The first site where a Googlebot finds the content doesn’t necessarily mean they are the original author – your site might only get indexed once a week whereas the other site could get indexed daily.

Ideally I would like to understand this more just to make sure Google gives you the credit for your content. Logically I think the “low levels of original content” is the key – i.e. if a site is known to republish a lot of content then it assumes all it’s content is copied.

I’ll let you know if I find out more.

Why Spam a post about Spam?

// November 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

Want to hear something weird? My previous post about Avoiding Forum Spam is without a doubt the most spammed posts on this blog. What’s the deal?

Could publishing another post on spam be asking for it???

Drupal

// November 4th, 2010 // No Comments » // Drupal

As far as CMS go you tend to see most people recommending WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. There are hundreds of other CMS platforms but these are often quoted as the three main ones.

The thing that separates these three platforms tends to be the complexity involved – WordPress is considered the simplest, then Joomla followed by Drupal.

My issue with WordPress is that it’s predominantly a blogging platform – and a very good one. With a fantastic community of developers developing add-ons and themes WordPress can no doubt be used as a generic CMS system – I admit that I am often amazed at how people utilise WordPress! However I get the impression that with WordPress you need to hack it a little to get what you want. I believe you end up needing to compromise because of it’s blogging origins.

At the other end of the scale appears to be Drupal – a more fully featured CMS however often regarded as too complicated for most.

So in between is Joomla and this seemed to be the logical choice for me however when I last looked at Joomla I wasn’t that impressed – I didn’t think it was that easy to use at all.

So with Joomla ruled out I’ve decided to bite the bullet and look at Drupal, so far I am impressed with the documentation and the community. Whether it fills my needs remains to be seen…

Australian Webmaster Update

// August 20th, 2010 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

One of my objectives of this blog is to track my progress of my various projects.

I was just looking at the statistics for australianwebmaster.com when I realized that last week the site received it’s highest amount of traffic since I began using Google Analytics on the site!

The forum has now got 3,990 threads, 22,293 posts and 5,578 members.

Back in January the site had 3,584 members. Works out to be about 10 new members a day over the past 7 months.

It still gets spammed every day however it’s still rewarding to see the place growing, even if it is slower than I’d like.

I still haven’t applied the vBulletin update which I’m concerned about because of how many releases behind I am however I’m dreading the effort required – and the potential issues I may face.

In the past week I’ve added an Australian Web Hosting specific section to the site – need to try to find a way of promoting it to hosting companies.

MM Forms, WordPress Form Plugin

// January 14th, 2010 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

There are an abundance of WordPress plugins for Contact Forms.

I’ve used a couple of different ones however the one I’ve settled on is one called MM Forms.

My main decision in selecting MM Forms was the requirement to automatically acknowledge the contact e-mail via an e-mail message. At the time I couldn’t find other contact form plug-ins that had this option.

I also believe it’s popular for saving form results in a CSV file – obviously something handy if you wanted to collate a lot of responses.

It’s quite powerful however relatively easy to use – I suggest checking it out.

I did experience a problem with it recently where the form hung on submit however I upgraded to the latest release and the problem was resolved. The only issue I still have is that the date format for date fields (with calendar control) is MM/DD/YYYY – for now I just used text fields.

Weekly review – 11/Jan

// January 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // webmasterblog.com.au

Last week I concentrated on my www.webmasterblog.com.au site. I am aiming for three posts per week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Last week I posted Top 2009 AU Domain Name Sales, How much is your site worth?, and Does Hosting in Australia Help your SEO?. Earlier today I published a post comparing AU Domain Name Prices.

Traffic is still very low. As part of my monthly Australian Webmaster Forum newsletter I mentioned the site had launched but the response wasn’t great. (The forum is also below normal so I am suspect/hoping people are just still on holidays)

I have set up a link exchange between the site and an Australian domain name forum which has resulted in some traffic.

My next step is to target Australian hosting companies offering them free promotion of any specials they offer. My intention is to publish a “Deals of The Month” post at the beginning of each month. This would get the site’s name out there, support the local Australian hosting market and provide visitors with a source of Australia’s best hosting deals.

A fresh look

// January 6th, 2010 // No Comments » // Webmaster tips

What better way to start the new year but with a fresh look!

I have just loaded up the free WooTheme called Irresistible.

I will probably need to do some minor tweaking in the coming weeks. For example, one thing that I found weird was that with the default styling hyperlinks weren’t standing out at all unless you rolled over them. I presume this was to make Post headings look cleaner but not having links highlighted I felt was a bigger issue. In any case I was easily able to add the following quick custom style and they are now underlined.

a, a:link, a:visited { color: #fff; text-decoration: underline; }

The other thing I noticed and have found in most other WordPress themes is that the heading sizes are out of whack – Heading 1 within a post will be dramatically larger than the post heading itself. Is it just me or don’t most people use the heading styles?

Anyway, it’s handy that WooThemes have an extra custom.css file where you can put any custom styling without editing the default styles. Means you can easily switch between your styles and the defaults.