jono.me

Avoiding forum spam

// May 16th, 2009 // Webmaster tips

I hate forum spam. It’s very demoralizing to wake up in the morning to see that someone has posted all this rubbish all over your forum. Not to mention the damage it can do to your site’s reputation when new visitors are greeted with it.

I compare spam with graphiti.

What can you do? Well more importantly, want don’t you do? Definately don’t implement a “solution” that is going to hurt your users – that’s just making this worse. If your willing to hurt your users just to beat the spammers then you may as well pull the plug.

Think about the real issue – what the motivation for the spammer? Work out what can you do to address that issue without effecting your users.

For me the real issue was that it looks bad.

My forum was using vBulletin so a search through the vBulletin mods turned up a great solution. Called Prevent Spam this mod will place any post containing certain keywords in to moderation for approval. I defined the the keyword “[URL]” as a spam word, which just so happens to be the keyword vBulletin uses to designate a link – therefore any time someone posts a link, the post is placed in moderation. The mod allows you to define how many posts that users need to have to avoid this, for me I chose 10.

It’s not fool proof however it addresses 99.9% of my spam. It means I have more moderation work to do but I’m on my forum several times a day so it doesn’t wait too long before it’s approve. Obviously having moderators would lighten the load too.

I did also turn of signature links for new members. This is breaking my own rule however I considered this acceptable. Even if a legitmate user’s only intention is to post so their signature is displayed, then I don’t think they are going to be a great contributor to the forum. I purposedly set this limitation to users with less than 5 posts so for the legitimate users it’s a minor inconvenience.

Note: If you do make these types of limitations I recommend you alert members in their welcome message. Cuts down on a lot of confusion.

Another thing I implemented was a random question on registration. I chose a vBulletin mod called NoSpam!. This in addition CAPCHA and validation e-mails gives another level of protection against spammers.

So remember, be creative in addressing the issue but whatever you do, don’t hurt your legitimate users. Unfortunately it seems spam is here to stay, but still make sure you put up a good fight!