Dealing With Forum Spam

It is a shame that we waste so much of our time on the Net dealing with spammers. Many forums become the target of spam robots (bots) that find a forum to attack and then start registering users with the intent of posting spam to the user’s account. Once they are registered users, they post spam which contains links that point to their website. This is to create a high link count and cause the site to rank high with the search engines.

As with all other aspects of the Internet, the forums are subject to receiving spam and receive tons of it. If you read the forums for forum administrators, you will see that prevention of spam is an ongoing discussion topic.

Most of the volume spammers are robots (bots) that find a forum that does not have the proper security provisions installed and then start pumping out registrations and postings to the forum.

From personal experience, I established a forum with very little previous knowledge of forums. I set the options to what appeared to be logical. At first, the forum did not require that a person be registered to post on the forum. This was quickly changed because of all the "drive by postings" that were posted that were usually worthless and pornographic. If a person has to register to post, the posts are usually more meaningful.

Things were fine until the bots discovered the forum and the spam postings began. The forum options were changed to require that the person identify numbers and letters from a graphic during registration. This was designed to defeat robot spammers.

Wrong! They just kept coming. It now appeared that the forum was under attack from human spammers. Cant’ you just see someone hunched over a keyboard in a third world country pounding out spam to the forum?

The registration option was changed to require the administrator to approve each registration. This generated a message to my forum mailbox for each bot registration. This amounted to 30 -40 attempted registrations per day.

After exhausting my knowledge on the problem, I built a web page at the forum address explaining that until further notice, the forum was suspended due to spam.

I looked for help and then posted a project on rentacoder.com. After receiving several bids, the project was awarded to a coder from England with a great performance rating.

He informed me that phpBB is so well known that the spammers can determine which graphic is being displayed at registration so the bot can answer the challenge question correctly. (So much for the visual recognition).

He installed a modification (also called mod or hack) to phpBB that will present the person (or bot) who is registering with various questions that only a human can read and answer. The forum administrator can change the questions and answers so the questions are not common on all phpBB sites.

Another feature he installed is the phpBB toolkit. This is a very handy tool for administering forum users. It facilitated the mass deletion of the many spam users that had already registered.

He also advised me to change the registration option so the forum sends a confirmation email to each new registration requiring a response before the account is activated. Spammers will not generally use valid email addresses thus the registration will fail.

The textual confirmation challenge modification has an option to send an email to the administrator for each registration failure. I enjoy watching these post in my forum mailbox knowing that the bots are being kept from registering on the forum.

With these options, the forum administrators are winning the spam wars. However, hold your breath since we know that the spammers will undoubtedly find a way around these methods, and we will have to "plug the dike" somewhere else.

In summary, my advice is do extensive research about forums before you establish one and hire a talented and experienced forum administrator to help you set up the forum. Whatever it costs, it will be money well spent.