How to deal with spammers
How to deal with spammers
by lunarpatrol, Wed May 19, 2010 21:29 Spammers are not only stupid robots that try to invade your forum topics by posting comments about viagra and so one... I find on my forum more and more people that register and just post one comment, that has generally a sense in the context of the topic, but strangely, their signatures are always complete and point to their own website.
It really looks like spamming, but not slightly different, as real human do this. Do you encounter the same kind of situation, and how do you deal with it?
- Remove posts?
- Ban users?
- Let them talk?
Thanks. Lunar
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Ryan
Re: How to deal with spammers
Whether it's generated from a human or a machine, spam can be a turn off for any online community. There are plenty courses of action you can launch against spam-attacks. Many times you can prevent an attack from happening before it begins. The very first thing you should do is research your forum software. It's possible that there are already tools made available to aid you with this task. The best way to deal with spam, is to have never dealt with it at all.
There are a few simple things you can do to drastically reduce spam, especially if your software can't help you. Consider enabling e-mail or admin validation (or both) so that new users will have to go through a bit of a process before they can post openly on your message board. Alternatively, consider granting access to members after they have reached a set number of posts. Many forum softwares offer these two options.
If all else fails, consider recruiting some friends to help you moderate your boards. New and old members alike are turned off by spam. The less you have, the better.
Good luck!
Brigo
Re: How to deal with spammers
I agree, most software provide an embedded or advanced plugins to prevent spamming. Administrating topics in a row is generally useful (moving or closing topics of the same user for example).
TudorBran
Re: How to deal with spammers
E-mail validation is a good way to fight against spammers. If they somehow manage to register, you should simply ban them forever.
Lastnico
Re: How to deal with spammers
Agreed, but more and more spam robots successfully create account on website protected with captcha (thanks to porn websites, that ask their users to decrypt captcha codes from other websites...) It therefore takes more and more time to ban those ****ing robots.
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Vassi
Re: How to deal with spammers
Mollom on Drupal does a very credible job of preventing those from joining your site the first go round.
Lastnico
Re: How to deal with spammers
Agreed. It's good to speak about it, because a new version has been released recently: Mollom 6.x-1.14
Please remember to upgrade your Drupal forums!
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Autgerdude
Re: How to deal with spammers
Spammers are annoying.
Even on the phpBB2 demo here, there are a lot of spammers.
Lastnico
Re: How to deal with spammers
Yes, fortunately, it is resetted everyday, but I'm wondering if it could be every 6 hours instead... Spamming a demo forum... This is very talented spammers!
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Mrsyafiq7
Re: How to deal with spammers
a well structure and organize server can help prevent spam bot from registering. For the real spammer (those come just to get backlink), there is only one way. Ban it. We don't need them.