How to deal with forum spam - Community Building and User Generated Content forum at WebmasterWorld - WebmasterWorld

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How to deal with forum spam

Hi Everyone, I'm so glad I found you.

marketingmama

10:24 pm on Dec 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Wow, this forum is intense. I expect to really learn a lot here. I'm really interested in real web design although I'm just a newbie and have only created my sites using WYSIWYG, I'm trying to learn.

Anyway, here's my predicament:

A "friend" of mine installed a forum for me. It is supposed to be a forum for newbies in the world of Internet marketing. I had really high hopes for this forum until...

My "friend" suddenly lost interest in helping me because I wouldn't use straight HTML to build my site. I wasn't ready and I wanted it to be live before I was 90 years old.

Anyway, the forum that I was so proud of has become defiled by creepy people who just keep posting links to their foul websites. To each his own, but it's not what was meant for my forum. It's scary now and I don't know how to fix it.

No one has actually posted anything, but one guy has a link to a porn site and another guy just registered a bunch of different user names so he could link his website which is nothing but the names of a huge list of medications.

I like that a user can put his or her website in their profile, but how do I get rid of these evil doers? What if someone who really wanted to use it came there and was scared away?

I want to put articles in there, but not until the weirdness is fixed. It looks like I came to the right place for help.

My question is "how do I get rid of the spammers on my forum so that I can actually have a legitimate place where newbies can ask questions without feeling like they're asking silly questions?"

Thanks in advance for your help.

Sheree

d40sithui

10:43 pm on Dec 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

well im rather new myself, but i think heres something to get you started. you should implement multiple defenses to thwart of spammers.
1) if you notice webmaster's forum, there are moderators um, moderating every section of the forum. now im not too sure on what overwhelming power they have over us normal users, i would expect them to at least have the ability to edit or even delete certain posts that may pertain as inapropriate. you yourself can be the moderator. you can give yourself rights to delete posts and remove users.

2) You can also do something in the backend as well. you can write code to filter out things you dont want (such as URLs, html code, etc). you can implement captcha for every post to check for spam bots, but that may annoy legitimate users. of course this is more involved than just html.

3) you can have a system where new users cannot start their own thread until after participating in several valid threads. again, this is more involved than html.

4)the design of the forum is important. it needs to be secure, robust, fast, anti-spam, efficient.

im sure theres more stuff u can do, but its a friday afternoon and mim tired of thinking =). maybe someone else can chip in =0

marketingmama

10:59 pm on Dec 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Therein lies the problem. I'm here because I don't know how to write code to make the magic happen. I have no idea how to moderate my own forum because I was left to sink or swim right after installation.

I want my forum back but I don't know where to start.

Sheree

JonSimmonds

10:32 pm on Dec 29, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

If your forum is using a popular script, such as phpbb, vbulletin etc there are a number of simple steps you can make which will stop a large portion of the spam, let us know what script you are using

rogerd

1:48 am on Dec 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator

10+ Year Member

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, marketingmama. Every commercial and open-source forum has provision for logging in as a moderator or administrator to, among other things, remove spam, revoke posting rights for problem members, etc. Even a custom script should have some of this functionality. In addition, there are many steps you can take to prevent spam registrations, etc.

So, please do let us know what kind of software your forum is running. Since you are seeing a heavy spam load, chances are it's a common enough package that leaves "footprints" for spammers to detect.

Ask your "friend" how to log in as administrator, too... You'll find tools there to solve some of your problems.