The online forums are considered as playgrounds by many online marketers and link builders. It may so happen that the purpose of the forum might get shattered. As a matter of fact, there are multiple advantages that a forum has to offer, for example : it might be a place to share and discuss knowledge, source of earning, promotion of websites, share experiences, offer suggestions and advice and lots more.
But it is a serious concern how forums are being populated by spammers, leading to hamper the genuine experience of using a forum. Most webmasters are concerned about managing spams and banning spammers from their online forums. If a particular forum is left un-audited for a week, it may destroy the community completely. Though there are certain methods that can help you limit this continuously increasing concern.
Tips to Prevent Spam on Forums
Moderators to keep a watch on the activity over Online Forums
Moderators can be of great help with tackling the issue. They have the rights to delete or edit spam threads and ban the users doing such activities. Though it may prove to be a stressful job on a busy forum. In that case you can seek help from volunteers or employ someone who can moderate your forum in a timely manner.
This also involves your role of making the moderators understand their role clearly. For that purpose you may need to train and educate them until they get a hold of things. Neat and clear walk-through can be laiden in occur to tackle the task of forum moderation on their own. While doing so, you must also think about those users who haven’t spammed the forums intentionally, but at the same time must identify the actual users that are spamming the forums.
For users who haven’t spammed your site intentionally, you may ask them to remove the post stating the appropriate reasons, this way you can not only maintain trust as you haven’t deleted the post without their knowledge but would also educate them about what is not allowed. For this purpose a simple PM might do the trick.
Restricting Registrations made via. Open Proxies
As most of us are aware, there are number of sites that provide a list of open proxies which can be used by anyone over the web. You may restrict the member registrations done via. these forums or ask your developers to include such a list for you. Many users would do this to encapsulate their identity and stay anonymous for any reason. While few spammers too would make use of such server and get registered with your forum. Hence, having a system in place that would instantly detect registration done via. proxy servers can help you avoid a great deal of spam activity on the forum. If you are using a software for forum which does not have such as facility, you download or purchase a mod that is capable of blocking proxy registrations.
Since social networking sites are being used by most of the people, some of the forum softwares now allow users to login to their forums using the social networking profiles. There are plugins that would allow you to do so.
Ask the Users to Populate the Member Profile Fields
Inorder to get registered in the forums, the users should need to manually populate the fields instead of some spam bots to register automatically. Creating such a bottle-neck can help you control and avoid forum spams to a great extent. You must also need to keep in mind that the registration form isn’t too long that it’ll piss-off them off and hence leave the registration and move away.
Picture Authentication for Forum Registration
Picture or image authentication is one of widely used techniques for avoiding spam. It helps in preventing spam bots from registering automatically on a website. Most webmaster would also refer it as captcha authentication, it is a tool that generates random texts or images and the users need to type the same in the adjacent fields. If the entered text matches with the captcha, only then the process goes to the next stage of registration. This technique has been proved very helpful with filtering out the automated tools like spam bots from getting an access to the site.
Send a confirmation URL via. Email
You would find this with most of the existing forums and is considered to be a reliable authentication and verification methods in the industry. In this, once a user has completed the registration process stated above, an automated email is sent to the registered email address. A confirmation URL is included in the email which the users needs to access to successfully get registered with a forum. Most individuals with an intention of spamming would never click the confirmation link for verifying the account hence eliminating spamming over your site.
Apart from the techniques stated above, there are few others such as IP blocking, swear filters, filtering URLs and website names, enabling flood control to limit the number of posts per user, using mass pruning, reporting spammer details to blacklist websites and ISPs and enabling existing forum members report spam etc. that can further enhance your efforts in controlling spam.
Spam has been a serious concern all across the Internet industry, newer and better techniques of spamming as well as their counter active measures are being implemented. So choosing an appropriate technique can help you protect your online existence.
Related Posts:
