jono.me

Fighting forum spam

// June 3rd, 2011 // 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.