How to Prevent, Understand, and Recognize Spam Messages

Spam is a major problem faced by websites, forums, and blogs across the internet. Administrators and other forum moderators need to be aware of the type of spam, how to recognize it, and how to prevent it. The major spam program that has been taking the online world by storm is called XRumer.

Xrumer is a Windows program that posts forum spam in a very fast and automated process. It is able to bypass common spam prevention techniques. These include account registration and email activation along with CAPTCHAs with are the codes you see an image file you normally enter before registered on sites. XRumer is used in order to improve search engine rankings especially in Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines.

What is different about XRumer and makes it hard to detect it is that links to websites are commonly not included in the spam message. The common spam used by XRumer is when posts are made to ask users questions along the following lines, "Where I can I find the official website for... (so and so product)." The program will then register another account on the same forum and answer the previous question while including the link. Therefore two different users seem to have interacted on the forum topic. This often can confuse forum administrators and search engines. Thus the site that was spammed will see a boost in search engine rankings.

XRumer costs $450 so it is not a cheap program by any means. It was developed by several Russian software programmers. XRumer gives the software user complete control over the messages displayed and where they are displayed. It makes the process extremely simple, fast, and completely automated. SlightyShadySEO said that he got 8000 backlinks in less than 20 days using the program. The software was built originally for forums such PHPBB, Yabb, mboard, but it also works on blogs, and guestbooks.

The other major advantage of XRumer is that it uses proxies. If the IP being used by the user is detected on the forum it will switch to a proxy and then post the spam message. This makes it an extremely powerful tool that can be used repeatedly on the same site.

Understanding that XRUmer exists and how it works is extremely important to anyone who runs forums, blogs, or websites. Knowing the messages to look out for that are actually spam and not users genuinely engaging in conversation is important. This can allow you to delete these users, the posts, and ban the IP used. However, you will also know that this is not enough, so you may have the repeat this process even for the same user. Since many people have this program you can have a lot of spam show up. Thus it is important to designate forum moderators if you as the administrator cannot keep a regular eye on the forum.

If you running forums you should always upgrade to the latest stable release. If you want you can update to the latest release although you will understand it could contain a few bugs. Do not use phpBB version 2 and use phpBB version 3. I have personal experience using phpBB 2 and it gets spams so heavily you cannot even keep up to delete.

As spam programs evolve and become better so to must antispam programs and software. Spam programs will always be a step ahead but there are many ways to prevent spam and make it virtually non existence on your website.

References:
SlightyShadySeo.com
Wikipedia: XRumer