I don't know how many of you have a forum as part of one of your website. I do. I also don't know if you belong to multiple forums. I do. Lately, we have all noticed a lot of spam on the big forums like DP, AP, SSWT's, etc., but is it filtering in to the smaller forums...the ones we may have and run as affiliate marketers that maybe are new or not as popular as the "big guns"? I can say that my new forum has not been hit hard. I have only had a few spammers and I banned their user names, IP's and email addresses & then removed the post. No big deal so far. But lately I am seeing new members join...about the last 7 out of the last 10 or so that are coming from what could be the spamming hot spots around the world, and the websites they list are either "affiliate links" and/or sub domains that are either shells or 404 errors. Are any other forum owners amonst you experiencing anything like this? With The new forum spamming software out there...I know of two but won't even give their names for fear someone reading this might buy and use one of them....it is going to get tougher and tougher protecting our forums from spammers. Any thoughts? Jm
If you can install yabb do it. You can at least blog any proxy incoming traffic and signup to your forum. I have a forum with very low traffic, Approx. 3 a day who try to register, login and to spam. Before I didn't use the feature and had spams in truckloads coming in. Many great features with yabb. For blogs, wordpress with aksimet feature works great too.
Thanks, Arnie. I will have to look into it. Sounds like a real help. Today, I had two new signups. And, like the majority of signups I have been getting lately, they list their homepage as a subdomain. And, yes when I click it or just enter the main part of the domain, I get a 404 page. I can't help but to feel these are like "cells" just lying in wait to do their spamming...the bastards! Jim
Very interesting Jim Guinn, I don't own any forums but I am thinking of starting some and this kind of problem (security problems and spammers) just holds me down.So I would be glad to hear what others have to say about this ... Arnie: I like Wordpress too but it still has some problems. For example: I closed the comments on one of my blogs and the spammers still access the submit comment feature (the comment is not posted but imagine what 500 comments per hour can do to the server... )
This will affect other forum members, Suppose one of your member (no spammer) reply to this post. it is important to removed the url (all forum adminsitrator and moderator do that) to not affect the other member.
What kind of software you run for your forum? Every software has some kind of protection mods. For start you should add CAPTCHA if possible and of course email verification for new accounts
What version do you use? upload and activate the aksimet spam blocker. works great here. from 100 to 0 spam a day now. Check under wordpress plugins. The theme could also be a hindrance though.
I'm not an expert, but I think it depends also what features you are running, like trackback and so. Aksimet is taking care of all, don't worry, they just had a major upgrade too for even better prodection than ever before.
I use to have forums on 2 sites and never really got around to make them very popular. They were getting a little traffic, but also around 10 spam signups a day so I just stopped accepting new signups and then about 1 month after I did that I thought that it would be better to just shut the forums down and just run the site without forums. I thought that this would be best as I were not going to make much money from them compared to the amount of work that I were going to have to put into them anyway. You are right in saying that things will get harder, everything on the web will get harder apart from coding a site and designing a site I guess. For example, the more people that use the web the more people that will make softwares and things to try and spam places. The more people that put a site on the web the more harder it will be to get traffic to your site because you will have more competition. Things on the Web can and will only get harder as time ticks by.