Seeking Forum advice [Archive] - The Warring States of NPF

talse

01-12-2007, 07:51 PM

This is more a plea for help from the mods here than anything else. I've got my own Webcomic and with it, a diminutive forums. It is at the present being besought by spam bots or some close fascimile.

I know that these forums are for the most part spam free as far the addvertising is concerned. How do you folks accomplish it? Manual deletion?

Meister

01-13-2007, 03:23 AM

Mostly, yeah. There's a huge variety of spambots that makes it difficult to figure out a way to block the preemptively - at least without creating disadvantages to users.

That said, there are lost of ways to deal with them manually. The best protection is a userbase smart enough to not click adspam links. You can also go through the member list or newly registered accounts and take a look at the names. Things like "buyviagra" or extremely generic names ("susan84") should set off your alarm bells. Don't ban them right away, but do check their data. If their e-mail is suspicious as well, you probably got one. The email might be the same as the username or it might even have a domain ending that clues you in to an advertising agency. Sometimes it even helps to google a suspicious name. Maybe you find instances of adspam under the same name at another forum.

All this is largely a matter of practice, though. Actual members-to-be could name themselves susan84 as well (although if you name yourself "buyviagra" you really, really are asking for it). I'd recommend looking at the profiles and e-mail adresses of existing spambots and learning the patterns. If there's, say, a certain e-mail domain that only spambots use, ban registration with it.

Oh, and another tip: don't get too riled up over it if one goes through. Pretty much the only thing you can do is ban them and delete their posts. Just do it as soon as you spot one and trust in your members not to click any ad links.

It's not exceedingly hard to deal with spambots. Just a bit of extra work.