When we visit forums we like to see it clean. Spams are a big turn off, a sign off poor management.
If you happen to run a community forum, you know how much effort you have to put keep your forum clean. For a mid size forum this could easily take several hours of your day time keeping eyes on posts, cleaning spams etc.
So why does some people spam in the first place, when they know their posts gonna get deleted? Here are some of the reasons I can think of.
- Quick traffic. Spammers post on high traffic forums, in most visited categories. They try to get as much traffic as they can before they get deleted.
- Indexing. High traffic forums get indexed very fast. Sometimes in matter of minutes. If the spam post get indexed, their site gets crawled and indexed as well.
Some forum owners take spam seriously, spending time to keep the forum nice and clean. Whereas some forum owners really don't care of spam. I guess that got to do something with lack of time to manage or willingness.
How to fight forum spam?
- Use captcha to prevent member registration using bots. Although its not 100% full proof, but it does help big time.
- Check against the forum spammer database for ip address, email etc. There are mods for vbulletin doing just that. Other forums might have something similar. You can even custom code this if you are comfortable with coding.
- For serious spammers make sure block their ip address to prevent future registration. This might not work most of the time, but might add some security.
- Spend time of forum. Always you and your mods should keep an eye on spams. Nothing work better then this.
Sarah Parker is a moderator at Webcosmo Webmaster Forum. Webcosmo Webmaster Forum is one of the leading source of information and help for webmasters. Join the Webcosmo Webmaster Forum community to learn and share with fellow webmasters.
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