How to Avoid Spam After Setting up Your Free Forum

Signing up for free forum hosting and a free forum is a great affordable way to get started with an online business. You can sign up for a free forum by visiting www.makeforum.org. But once you have a forum up and running, you have to deal with problems that may arise such as spammers. It is really unfortunate that so much time is wasted dealing with such things as spam. Unfortunately, a lot of forums have become places where spam robots, referred to as bots, like to attack so that they can register users to post spam on their accounts. The spam that they post always has links pointing to the person's website. They are trying to make a high link count so that their site will end up ranking high in the search engines.

Forums like e-mail are the most vulnerable as they get a lot of spam. The administrators of websites are caught up with this problem. They spend hours trying to devise news ways of tackling spam. You need to have the right security to keep bots away otherwise you will be caught unawares and get hit by a ton of spam.

Often people make the mistake of setting more options in their free forums not realising that they are actually inviting spam inadvertently. So, it is best to be wary of these options in the first place. Then, make sure to install some small security measures to safeguard against spammers. The easiest way to shove spam out of the way is to make people register before they post on a forum. This will solve the problem to a large extent.

But how do you register them? It is not difficult at all. You ask people to identify numbers and letters from a graphic during the registration process. This is enough to distinguish between a human and a robot, because a robot cannot fill out a form in such a manner. So the question of creating fake registrations will not arise.

But the problem gets worse when human spammers sign up and send out the spam that way. These spammers hire people in third world countries for very low wages to send out a multitude of spam. The only way you can control this menace is by asking the administrator to approve every registration that goes through. Once you start sifting, you will get 30 to 40 attempted registrations each day that are from spammers.

Sometimes spammers can figure out what graphic is displayed during the registration process and the robot can actually answer the question with the right answer. A clever way some forum administrators have gotten around this is to install a modification that will ask the bot certain questions that only a human can read, comprehend, and answer. Because you can change the questions and answers, it can be different for each forum and robots won't be able to catch up to you.

All you need to know is whether the registration is a human or a robot. You can get a confirmation about this through their e-mail address. This is the simplest way to know whether the registrant is real person or a robot.