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

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.

australianwebmaster.com update

// August 28th, 2009 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

Australian Webmaster continues to be my main focus and has had a great past week – my traffic has been consistently higher than normal which is really great to see.

The monthly newsletters seem to be doing the trick of reminding people about the site. I’ve also proceeded with the “Site Of The Month” competition.

These two things have probably caused the recent traffic spike but hopefully it will continue!

I’ve put on two additional moderators however they aren’t big contributors unfortunately, but they can approve moderated posts in those times I can’t which is great.

I still need to get the word out about the site and at this stage I can only see this happening by getting out there and getting involved in other forums and blogs. It’s a catch-22 though, if I’m out marketing the site activity can drop off and then the people that my marketing does attract see a site with little activity!

I think I have to do something though to take it to the next level.

and we’re back…

// July 6th, 2009 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

In my last goal post I mentioned I’d be a little quiet for a bit – well, it took a bit longer than expected!

I was actually repainting my office so the computers were all packed away for a couple of weeks and I was just doing the odd bit of maintenance using my laptop. We finished painting about a week ago but then I had end of financial year and had to update the accounts so I stayed offline for a little longer to get it all out of the way.

Have a few things to finish off in the office (door handle, rehang whiteboard, etc) but I trying to be productive again!

What’s new?

I got another good ad sale! I was happy after my first one but then they came back for another! Ever since buying australianwebmaster.com I was wanting to buy vBSEO but at US$150 I didn’t want to spend that much on what is a bit of a gamble – with these two ad sales I decided to take the plunge.

Will need to wait for Google’s next PR update to see whether it changes the PR.

I’ve made a few other minor changes to Australian Webmaster and kept up with the monthly newsletter.

Nothing else much has happened…

I now need to sit down and map out my next priorities now I should be getting back in to things.

Plans for this week

// May 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Personal Goals, australianwebmaster.com, diyweb.com.au, freecssgallery.com

I need to put some commitment in to getting some things done. This week I am planning to work on the following:

freecssgallery.com

I have left this site for quite some time, in fact the last template added was 7 March. I was expecting a whole lot more traffic to the site than what I am getting, having said that, the site traffic seems to be picking up but it’s still pretty pathetic.

I have a number of CSS template lists bookmarked so it’s just a matter of going through and picking out the ones I think look the best. As I’m using WordPress I can then schedule them to have a new template to appear once a day.

My plan is to do around 30 templates then I can then I forget about it for a month. After that I can the reassess what do with the site.

diyweb.com.au

Not something I do very often but I was looking at the Whirlpool forums over the weekend and noticed a couple of people asking questions about setting up a basic web site. They were getting some pretty unhelpful advice – like go and learn HTML. Valid advice but I don’t think people NEED to know HTML to build a basic web site.

A while back I had an idea for a web site which catered for this type of person, I registered the domain diyweb.com.au but other than setting up the default WordPress install I hadn’t got much further.

The idea is to teach people how to start their own web site on the cheap.

This week I would like to put a bit more thought in to this site. I could easily get carried away with building the site so I want to work out what I MUST have to do to get it up and running. I’m not 100% sure where the income would come from (it might be a community service project? ) so I want to control how much time I spend on it.

australianwebmaster.com

Planning on trying to hang back a bit on this one for this week and work on some other sites. Will probably do some posting today (as it always goes dead over the weekend) and then see if I can leave it until the weekend.

Other stuff

• I have to put together a web design brief for a web site – planning on holding a competition on DigitalPoint for a design. Mainly done however have to come up with some example sites showing the type of stuff I like.
• I have to re-post a development project on a freelance site after the person we had doing it failed to deliver.
• I also want to keep up the posts on here, jono.me. It’s a bit of a personal challenge to keep committed to this site like I’ve intended to several times. Over the past week you can probably see a mixture of posts from personal blogs (like this one) to more hints & tips – a little  unsure what I should be posting at this stage. Thinking that the “hints & tips” probably deserve a better location than here but at this stage, just posting something is my goal.

Australian Webmaster update

// May 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

I spend an awful amount of time on australianwebmaster.com because you have to check on a forum a few times a day to make some posts and to moderate posts. As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s one of those sites where I’ve put so much effort in to it I can’t just drop it.

It’s coming up to 12 months since I took over the site – boy time flies!

The traffic is building though. Each month the traffic grows which is really good. Last month there wasn’t such a big growth but the site had a 30% increase the month before which I thought was really good. Hopefully things aren’t starting to slow down!

A few months ago I sent an e-mail out to a section of the members, basically those who had posted but not returned to the site for a while. I asked what they wanted from the forum. Didn’t get a massive response however I did get some suggestions.

The main thing I am doing now is putting out a monthly newsletter – it give members a reminder about the site. I am just about to send out my third one so hopefully it will get things humming along again.

The other thing is holding a live chat on the site for members to get together. The first one went really well, however the second didn’t. The first one was held on a Thursday night however I decided to run the second one on a Sunday night – I think that was my mistake. I have since gone to the community to ask their preference, which seems to be mid-week oo the next one will be held on a Wednesday. Hopefully a lot more people come this time!

Some other suggestions included highlighting more posts on the forum home page, just not the last post in each section. I was able to put a vBulletin add-on to do this.

Someone mentioned converting the site to a blog, which I thought would be a waste.

Still unsure what the future holds for australianwebmaster.com, it takes up a lot of time which I would like to be spending on other projects…

2009 Progress – Q1

// April 6th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

A quarter of the year has gone so I thought I would do a quick review.

I was just re-reading my 2009 goals and can pretty much say I’ve failed all round.

My goals were to:

1. do frequent posting on here – improved but not what I’d call frequent!
2. developing outside webmaster niche – failed again, I started another template site!
3. develop content/service sites – haven’t done

So what have I done?

My focus has been on australianwebmaster.com. It’s one of those sites that need a lot of attention and since I’ve put so much effort in to it you have to keep pushing so it’s not all a waste. It’s not going too badly, I will post an update shortly.

I also find myself burn out with external pressures (e.g. my full-time job) and I need to take a break from my web sites. It does effect my goals significantly however my first priority has to be my full-time job as that’s what pays the bills.

I’m still confident that forcing myself to update this blog is the best way to keep myself on track.

The other option is to set myself a goal of spending x number of hours a week on my sites however I don’t think it would work – my full-time job controls everything else and I still need to spend time with my wife and kids, etc.

Thank God for stats!

// March 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // australianwebmaster.com

If I ever need motivation for a site, looking at the stats helps to remind me that the effort is worth it.

Fortunately all my active sites come up with a nice green number in the % change column of Google Analytics.

I often get down about australianwebmaster.com however I was just looking through the stats and February was a record month for the site. The vBulletin stats also showed a record number of new posts for the month!

I’m one happy webmaster today.