Shove Spam Out of the Way and Save Your Free Forum
by Michal Jajko
Signing up for free forum hosting and a free forum is a great affordable way to get started with an online business. You can sign up for a free forum by visiting www.makeforum.org. But once you have a forum up and running, you have to deal with problems that may arise such as spammers. It is really unfortunate that so much time is wasted dealing with such things as spam. Unfortunately, a lot of forums have become places where spam robots, referred to as bots, like to attack so that they can register users to post spam on their accounts. The spam that they post always has links pointing to the person's website. They are trying to make a high link count so that their site will end up ranking high in the search engines.
Forums like e-mail are perpetually struggling to prevent spam because they receive a lot of spam. The administrators of websites are constantly engaged with finding ways and means to keep spams out of the way. The robots do the spamming in volumes, and the only way to keep the bots away is to have the right security in your forum otherwise you will be flooded with a lot of spam.
Many people, especially if you're just setting up a free forum, make the mistake of going into it with hardly any knowledge of how forums work. You may set your options to something that seem to be good, but after a while, you will find out that implementing some small security measures will save you a lot of trouble. First of all, always make sure that people must register before they post on a forum. This will stop drive by posting from occurring, which is usually pointless and often sends people to links with pornographic material.
But how do you keep the robots away? Once they discover your site, the spam postings will begin in bulk. A way to control this and keep robots away from your forum is to require people who register to identify numbers and letters from a graphic during the registration process. A robot, of course, cannot fill out a form in such a manner and won't be able to create any fake registrations.
Sometimes this doesn't work though, simply because human spammers will sign up and send out the spam that way. Oftentimes people are hired in third world countries for very low wages to send out a multitude of spam. So what do you do in this situation? One way to control this is to have the administrator approve every registration that goes through. You will see once you do this, that you'll get 30 to 40 attempted registrations each day that are from spammers.
Sometimes spammers try and figure out the displayed graphic during the registration process, which is passed on to the robot that gives the right answer. To beat them you will have to modify the questions so that only a human can read, comprehend, and answer them. Robots will not be able to match up to you if you change the questions and answers for each forum.
Another simple method is to force new registrations to confirm that they are an actual person through their e-mail address. You simply send everyone an automatic message that forces them to click a link through the e-mail message to confirm. This is a great way to know that someone is a real registrant.
Michal Jajko is the creator of the free forum site makeforum.org. A knowlegeable webmaster, he also provides free forum hosting. You can get a unique content version of this article.
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