The crap doesn't make it to the public part of the page, hence, the crap submissions don't drag your site down. It's a balancing act, if you think about it. You make it easy for people to make submissions, but you don't want garbage smelling up your directory, right? It all comes down to how much time you are willing to spend grooming your directory. You can use "gatekeeper" type scripts, like CAPTCHA, and some of the burden is relieved from the directory owner and transferred to the submitter. Or you can charge for submissions, making it a non-profitable endeavor for spammers. But then you (in my humble opinion) might lose out on some great submissions, simply because a content owner may not want to pay between $1 and $200 to get listed in a directory that doesn't have much impact. I've had pretty good luck in getting quality submissions, simply by moderating. Of course, this has only been my personal experience, with my rinky-dink directory, which is only a small part of my overall site. Further, this is only my opinion, which may or may not help the OP in making a decision on which course to take. Other folks have other opinions, right?
Right. @dwirch - I thought you were saying that by moderating the submissions the spammers knew not to bother.
You should add two custom profile fields which new users will have to fill in when signing up to your forum: 1- Are you sure you want to join the forum? Options: Yes Or No 2- How much is 3+4? 3=4=____ By doing this i 88% of my spam problem is solved and for remaining 12%, i do a little effort of moderating the forum posts myself because they are not some bots or software's, they are real humans.
Change one word and it works for directories... I think he was giving an example of how automated submission can be stopped rather than something forum specific
when you put an "anyways" in front of a thank you it turns it into thanking him for his time, not his information.
I'm very sorry. I have a forum so while writing the post i forgot that you have a directory and i wrote everything about forum but you can use custom profile fields with directory too. No need to fight on one word. I don't mind.
in india anyways means koi baat nahi means no probs. i said thanks for his valuable answer, i dont think we have to argue and do blah blah on that.
Honeypot is the way to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing) with this method you basically add a field which is not visible to the human eye. So it's impossible for a human to fill it in, however bot can recognize the field and automatically tries to fill it in. If the field is filled the Honeypot alert it as spam. Don't even need captcha You can also try to change the URL of the submit pages to something unqique. This is usually a good way to combat spam if your using a well know script or CMS.