Preventing Spam From Entering Your Free Forum

Spamming is a big nuisance. Free forums have to put up with this nuisance all the time. Since free forum is the most cost-effective way of starting a business online, many individuals sign up with sites like www.makeforum.org. However, once they have set up a forum, they are invaded by spammers and they have to waste a lot of time dealing with these unwarranted problems. Spam robots, or bots as they are generally called, attack forums to register users to post spam on their accounts. The spam has links pointing to the person's website. All this is done to make a high link count so that their site is ranked high in the search engines.

Forums like e-mail are perpetually struggling to prevent spam because they receive a lot of spam. The administrators of websites are constantly engaged with finding ways and means to keep spams out of the way. The robots do the spamming in volumes, and the only way to keep the bots away is to have the right security in your forum otherwise you will be flooded with a lot of spam.

Many people, especially if you're just setting up a free forum, make the mistake of going into it with hardly any knowledge of how forums work. You may set your options to something that seem to be good, but after a while, you will find out that implementing some small security measures will save you a lot of trouble. First of all, always make sure that people must register before they post on a forum. This will stop drive by posting from occurring, which is usually pointless and often sends people to links with pornographic material.

But how do you keep the robots away? Once they discover your site, the spam postings will begin in bulk. A way to control this and keep robots away from your forum is to require people who register to identify numbers and letters from a graphic during the registration process. A robot, of course, cannot fill out a form in such a manner and won't be able to create any fake registrations.

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.

Another simple method is to force new registrations to confirm that they are an actual person through their e-mail address. You simply send everyone an automatic message that forces them to click a link through the e-mail message to confirm. This is a great way to know that someone is a real registrant.