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Shove Spam Out of the Way and Save Your Free Forum

By: Michal Jajko

Spamming is a big nuisance. Free forums have to put up with this nuisance all the time. Since free forum is the most cost-effective way of starting a business online, many individuals sign up with sites like www.makeforum.org. However, once they have set up a forum, they are invaded by spammers and they have to waste a lot of time dealing with these unwarranted problems. Spam robots, or bots as they are generally called, attack forums to register users to post spam on their accounts. The spam has links pointing to the person's website. All this is done to make a high link count so that their site is ranked high in the search engines.

Forums like e-mail are the most vulnerable as they get a lot of spam. The administrators of websites are caught up with this problem. They spend hours trying to devise news ways of tackling spam. You need to have the right security to keep bots away otherwise you will be caught unawares and get hit by a ton of spam.

Many people, especially if you're just setting up a free forum, make the mistake of going into it with hardly any knowledge of how forums work. You may set your options to something that seem to be good, but after a while, you will find out that implementing some small security measures will save you a lot of trouble. First of all, always make sure that people must register before they post on a forum. This will stop drive by posting from occurring, which is usually pointless and often sends people to links with pornographic material.

But how do you keep the robots away? Once they discover your site, the spam postings will begin in bulk. A way to control this and keep robots away from your forum is to require people who register to identify numbers and letters from a graphic during the registration process. A robot, of course, cannot fill out a form in such a manner and won't be able to create any fake registrations.

But the problem gets worse when human spammers sign up and send out the spam that way. These spammers hire people in third world countries for very low wages to send out a multitude of spam. The only way you can control this menace is by asking the administrator to approve every registration that goes through. Once you start sifting, you will get 30 to 40 attempted registrations each day that are from spammers.

Sometimes even robots can find the right answers when spammers make out the displayed graphic during the registration process. There is a way to beat them in their game by installing a modification that will ask the bot certain questions that only a human can read, understand, and answer. Just keep changing the questions and answers, and robots won't be able to keep pace with you.

All you need to know is whether the registration is a human or a robot. You can get a confirmation about this through their e-mail address. This is the simplest way to know whether the registrant is real person or a robot.

Article Source: http://www.rightarticle.com

Michal Jajko is the creator and administrator of the free forum site makeforum.org. A knowlegeable website designer, he also offers free forum hosting. Click to find out more.





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