Help! Someone spamming forum with porn links.

Someone keeps adding IDs to my forum just to add a link to either a porn or pills site. Any advice on how to stop this? He is using a different email and domain each time, but its the same person. I've banned a couple of domains and ip's - but he still finds another way in.

Also, can the porn links on the page hurt my adsense account?

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks,

Gil

 

Some forums require 10 posts before someone can post a link or have a link in their signature. You could disable the signature feature until the person has made 10 posts above 100 words or something or add nofollow to all new people's links so that it won't hurt your forum in the search engines. Measures like these may prove to be enough of a deterrent that the spammers will go elsewhere.

 

Surely captcha or other image or email verification would have been enabled during registration to prevent fake registrations. Other than what brian2 suggested sounds a very good idea.

 

Unless you let us know what forum software you are running, we cannot give you a precise answer .
Porn links well there are mixed answer's for this question.
Look in here for more details: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=94609

 

is his name Robert?

 

Disable all links for a week.

 

I'm running phpBB. Yes, I know, I should have used vb - I was trying to go the cheaper route until I could get the forum off the ground.

 

Uses a lot of different names. Some email addresses he uses to register have the same domain - I have banned those, but he comes up with a different one.

I know its the same person, every one of his posts has the same style - really doesn't make sense. Then at the bottom, he posts a note to admin. Something to the effect of: 'Newb here, sorry if this post is in the wrong place'

I have actually seen this person spamming some other forums I visit as well.

 

I've seen a lot of this in the last few days on another forum. My impression is that it is a SPAM-BOT. Your forum might be on a spam list. I saw an advertisement a few weeks ago for software that did exactly this.

In addition to the ideas already presented in this thread you could consider renaming your registration page.

 

I got the same problem... Even I activate the captcha and email confirmation still get spams in my forum... (i'm using phpbb)

 

This was the case even on my another forum, which is on sfm, Installed a mod enabled captcha everything seems to be fine now.
Just enable captcha and make sure you install a phpbb mod and user group permissions.
You might wish to have this mod installed.
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=367621
Post us back the results and see what happens

 

You know, I wonder if these spammers actually see any revenue from their efforts - I don't know of anyone who would buy or subscribe to products from a spammed message.

You would think that the efforts that they spend trying to come up with ways to send unsolicited messages would be better served actually doing something legitimate. I would bet that they would have a better return on time investment doing something legitimate.

 

I would get somehing to block his IP.

 

got the same problem, try this:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=189001

 

always ban there IPs..and usernames..u should hav verification while user registration

 

thats quite useless, they always use proxies and change the username every time.

 

That is the darker side of the SEO, even if they don't get any revenue the search engines will find the links and count them as backlinks.

I think that is the main reason behind spamming forums, not the visitors.

 

You'd probably want to consider not allowing users to post URLS until they reach a certain number of posts, and have been a member for a few days via installing a mod.

Just ban the user names, IPS and even the domains associated with the email accounts if possible (just make sure his not using something like Hotmail )

If you'd like to take things a step further, you'd probably want to consider getting in contact with his ISP.