Put a section that your not interested in on the top. Most of the spammers will post there (this is assuming that you moderate all your posts). Then delete that section every few weeks or once a month. Next, remake that section and start over. This saves a lot of time in disapproving posts one by one. This is what happened on my job forum. They all posted on the top section. Which was fine by me because it had only one approved (visible) post. So deleting that section and then remaking it was no big deal. Remember, you might want to put one or two posts in the "not interesting" section so it will be attractive and the spammers won't figure out your trick. Now, I don't know how this method works with SEO. I don't know wether it helps or hurts your page rank or search engine rankings. I don't think it does any damage.
it is good idea, but dont think it is really useful.. i have tried it in my kidds forum, but it has not really worked great for me
I think this would have a negative effect on SEO. Besides I'd also rather just moderate and delete spam than let it build in a board at the top of my forum. I think that would look pretty messy.
The problem with this method is that you are letting spammers flood your site and just deleting their posts after a time. The damage is still done, and members of your forum and see their messages still, especially if it's in a subforum listed at the top of your forums. Spammers won't give a damn if you delete their posts. They have bots that will simply come to your site and re-post everything. You need to be more pro-active than this HOWEVER, if you have the skill you could put in code so that posts made by spammers are only shown to site admins, moderators, and the accounts that posted them. That way the search engines and other people on your forum won't see them when they do get posted. A friend of mine does this on their forum, seems to work really well. Spammers pretty much don't bother anymore since they don't get anywhere with it.
I think I'm just going to block China entirely. Literally 100% of the spam bots that hit my forum come from there and I'm sick and tired of the same routine every day.
It is a nice trick. I suggest it to my friend when we were starting our new forum but he didn't follow me. Now we are facing difficulties due to spammers.
The trick posted by the OP sounds interesting. However, I would suggest the category to be at the bottom, and explicitly mention that you can post links to interesting websites etc. This means spammers will take it for granted that you can post there which you can delete from time to time
Its tough managing spammers, I agree with the above post, if a known spammer is giving trouble just keep a list of blocked ip addresses.
Its a fun idea yes, however I doubt if its gonna work in real. Spammers always target parts of the forum that got more visitors, because they wanna maximize the views before it get deleted. Its not a good idea letting people post spam on a forum though, I would rather work to delete them
The problem with banning an IP is that it's really easy to spoof your IP address. Yes you could stop them from using that single IP address, but you are also blocking other people from coming to the forum.
I dont think manual spammers will get trapped in that stupid trick. Spammers will find out which forum is best working and is attracting more members and they will spam there. you can delete that forum. morever if you delete any forum you will irritate your readers by showing no page exists error.
I don't want porn and crap to be visible on my site. Plus, I'll never approve thier posts and I don't want to lie even to other liars. Right but the "not interesting forum" has few or no posts. Already I checked my forum and half of the spammers are going to the "not interesting" forum. So that cuts my work in half. Remember, I'm not deleting the whole forum just that section. Is spoofing IP addresses common? I never approve spam messages. In other words, they never become visible. But I have to delete them to keep the forum clean.