Forum Spamming

Forum spamming is the posting of messages that are either rubbish, abusive, a advertising gimmick or useless. Numerous forums commonly set rules against forum spam, as these can be bothersome for other forum guests and administrators. Even so, those who typically commit this normally do not hold any regard for the guidelines the forum administrators have set.

In a forum, spamming can take place as frequently as feasible, especially when the forum is left unmediated. It could take place in just a couple of hours, or even minutes and might even bring the forum server to crash. It also can take location in several forms. Forum spam can either be any of the following:

When a user or a forum spammer successively revives much more than one particular thread inside a matter of hours. These are threads, which have not been participated into for far more than a couple months and have been demoted to the back pages of the forum.
When a user or a forum spammer repeatedly posts the very same message in a number of boards.

These messages are typically advertisements in nature, and a lot more usually than not, involve adult content or internet site hyperlinks.
When a user or a forum spammer posts a message that is not connected to the topic or does not contribute to the discussion. The message could also be ads or promotions.
When a user of a forum spammer simply posts endlessly, just to boost post count and forum ranking. Their posts contribute absolutely nothing substantial to the thread and could even be just 1-liners or graphics.

For forum administrators, preventing forum spamming is not that extremely challenging, specially when you already have the measures at your disposal. Forum software’s like phpBB, YaBB and SMF have incorporated modifications to their software particularly to combat this difficulty. These modifications might be installed or set by the administrator to their preference. These modifications are normally quite flexible that the controls and use of it may successfully be customized to what the forum wants. Modifications like this can help stop forum flooding, trolling and forum spam. It can alter posting successions (exactly where the time of final post to the subsequent post is set at a specific interval), image posting (where the administrator can either deactivate it or set a pixel range) or the use of member privileges (like disabling or limiting signature text and avatars).

Additionally, the forum administrator can also double check a forum spammer’s identity by way of his or her IP address, and could act on this accordingly. Banning forum spammers’ IP address often does the trick, particularly if the forum spam takes place as well usually and as well plenty. Additional measures like moderating new registrants and approving or disapproving their posts, may possibly take up a lot of work. But this is also a really effective way to curb forum spamming.

Also, forum administrators need to be wary of bots, crawlers and spiders as they usually bring in these forum spammers. There are also special modifications so that these may be prevented. Check with the assistance group of the kind of software program your forum utilizes as they typically have the repair for these types of forum spam.