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A little over a month ago, we launched a new forum for the smallwood industry. It's been fun, but it's also been a lesson in how many sharks there are out there! Without meaning to, we set the security high enough to keep out the automated junk, but we are getting the "human" spammers. We've been watching it and manually deleting the junk and the users who post it.
This forum is very well run; so, I thought I would ask how you manage to keep out the junk???
It's our crew. Myself, OldSarge, TipPro, Cinnamon, InfoSourcing etc. If you click view forum leaders you'll see all our moderators listed. This is one of 30 forums I manage, so I had the advantage of seeing a spammer hit one forum, and then blocking them from joining the remaining 29. That kind of helps.
Also, I watch the forums like a hawk most of the day and night. If I see the same user joined 6 or 10 forums in an hr, I know they're there to spam. No one joins that many in an hr just to post legitimately. So those get banned before they can even activate their accounts and spam.
A few additional things I do that might help, I search their IPs and if they're not on dialup, I ban the IP. Also, I add the domain name of the site they're spamming for to the censored words list, so that even if they DO come back with another IP, they're just posting dead links, like : www.******.com
Thanks so much for your help. Forum are such a great tool; if only all the world were as helpful and considerate as the forum community.
Spam is an ever constant battle for forums which will probably never be stopped but can be detered through good forum moderation.
Yup good forum moderators and disabling html code is a good way to eliminate alot of the spam.
Plus there are programs out there that actually submit spam posts to over 26,000 forums (I was just reading about this the other day).
I think that most of these forums that I participate on have to be listed - I see the same message on all the boards all the time.
It just take good moderating since they don't give up and sometimes blocking a range of IPs will help.