How Do You Keep Spammers Out Of Your Forum?

This is aimed at forum owners... How do you manage to stay ahead of the dirty spammers who feel they have the right to fill our forums with their rubbish? Out of everything I've tried I'd say Q&A is the best way of stopping them from registering. You just have to be a little ingenious about the way you do it.

 

As a member of really big boards I can say they have a lot of possibilities, but sometimes they just don't want to get rid of "spammers", if they are "spamming" about the right topic and stuff. Sometimes they are like "traffic driving force". Also, as far as I know there is an antispam system, simple feature - approving new members by admins after their registration.

 

But how does the admin figure out which of the new users are spammers and which ones are real users? Also, sometimes you see bots register on some forums and just start creating a lot of new topics about Nike shoes on a forum about cars and stuff like that.

 

Hard work, eyes like an eagle and skin tough as a hippo!

 

Apart from giving members the facility to report spam for themselves, the only thing you can really do is make frequent checks and remove if necessary. You'll need to decide whether you want to be have the sole privilege or do you wish to extend this ability to mods too.

 

I've noticed that spammers and spam software post mainly during the hours of night in the US, so that forum owners and members don't find their posts for several hours. I'm in the UK, so when I come online in the morning it's still the middle of the night in the US. I have often seen a forum flooded with spam when I log in. Although I report it, the Admin is unlikely to be awake or online, so the spam might be there for some time.

When I was a moderator in a forum, I was one of several in different parts of the world, so that forum was moderated 24 hours a day and spam was not a problem.

 

Thanks for the tip. This has been my problem for a very long time in my forum. Everytime I wake up in the morning and check my forum, it is flooded with lots of spam.

 

Most forum software has built in features to keep spammers and robots out of your site. A caption is usually required upon registration which will keep most spam bots out. Stop Forum Spam is also a great tool. It's a database of reported IPs, emails, usernames, etc. that have been reported as spam sources.