Spambots And Forums

By Author: Carolyn Clayton
Total Articles: 173
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Everyone of us who is a regular Internet user, whether it is merely having an email account, posting on websites or owning your own website have more than likely experienced spam at some point, with most people suffering from the burden everyday.

Although email spam remains the biggest threat and annoyance to Internet users there are other forms of spam on the Internet that are catching up, the main example being forum spam. If you have a large website that has a lot of space your forum will most likely be powered by MySQL, vBulletin, Invasion Power Board or phpBB etc. These power the biggest forums and are the most used throughout websites on the Internet that have forums. By using one of these programmes to power your forum you will have less of a problem when it comes to spam as in order to post on forums powered by these you have to be a member of the forum.

Forums that have the worst problems with spam aren't doomed however; there are steps that can be taken to reduce the amount of spam posts that appear on these forums. You should always make sure that people have to register on your forum to be able to ...
... post on it. By doing this you are given the opportunity to moderate new users, by doing this you will be able to keep an eye on the type of messages that these new users leave on your forum; if the messages are genuine then you can start to un-moderate these users, however if the posts that they make are spam then you are able to delete their membership before they start posting a vast amount.

Although it was believed that by making people have to register to your forum in order to stop spam being posted, this theory has been proven wrong due to what are known as spambots. These spambots are automated programmes that are made for the purpose of registering on forums. They supply the forum with a fake name and email address and even mask their IP address making them untraceable. Spammers then use these spambots to post on the forums. The spammer sets the message that the spambot will leave and the spambots signature on the forum will be filled with links that will take you to the spammer's website. These links will more than likely take you to sites that are based around gambling, pornography and pharmaceuticals, which are normally weight loss supplements.

These spambots increase the workload of a forum administrator, making the moderators of a forum have to check every new member and on a forum that has an average of hundreds of new members within a week, this job becomes to time consuming, which in effect pushes up the labour costs of running the site.

Forums are meant to represent a place where opinions on a certain subject matter can be shared, somewhere you can share news with other members as well as being a host for expert advice; spammer's are taking this privilege away from genuine users and are starting to discourage people from using the forum.