Stop Bad Bots and Spam in Your Forum

Why Bother Spamming Forums?
There is a problem on the Internet that does not seem to want to go away, and that is spammers. Obviously they must be getting somewhere with this cheap and rather intrusive form of advertising because they keep doing it.

If it is not bad enough getting the spam in email, the spammers go to the lengths of spamming forums and comment boxes also. I find this tactic by spammers to be rather futile, especially in a well moderated forum.

The reasons I can see why a spammer is spamming a forum would be to get as many IP addresses blocked as possible, they are also scraping information about your users such as their email addresses and surfing habit.s... these are not the only reasons, but because spamming a forum usually is picked up right away by moderators and thus the post is removed sometimes the malicious behavior of bots and spammers is missed.

Make sure your moderators know what to look out for, good moderators that are logged into your forum regular can be more than effective against rogue bots and users.

So the attempt at spamming was worthless in the very least.

Was it? the answer is no, a spambot or scraper will have done its job after attacking your forum if:

a. Your forums member list is visible and email addresses are shown in the members profile. If a bot answers a post it will have been done to either spam with irrelevant information, malicious url's such as porn or even just to check if the forum is active.

b. Some spammers do it because your forum is a threat to another with the same content. It does happen so being as friendly as you can with forums of a similar nature, things such as banner swapping etc will go a long way to building good relations.

The Members List One sure reason as to why a forum is spammed would be an attempt to get the details of emails from your forums members list.

Forum Operators/Webmasters should remove the ability of registered members and guests to read profile emails and websites to combat the spammers and protect their users.

Banning IP's Banning IP's is pretty much self destructive unless you know what you are doing.

You can ban many genuine users by banning some IP's. The best IP's to block are the ones that you can trace to proxy servers. Check out IP's at any one of the good IP Tracker Websites or by clicking 'who's this' in the moderator panel. If the I.P. Checks out as a proxy then ban the whole range it operates from. Then report the I.P. to blacklists. The Host of the Proxy I.P. will be forced into combating spam to remove themselves from the blacklist.

Banning Bots Some Bots are very malicious, you need to check your 'who's online', to see exactly what is going on with the bots.

If you see a bot reading the 'Users Control Panel' then remove it there is no reason for a bot to be in the user control panel, ban the URL it runs from, and ban the I.P. Range. This will go a long way to combating some spammers.

htaccess Banning bots through htaccess if you can access your forum file manager could be another method, you can try the method found here http://articlechase.com/Stop-Spambots%2C-Scrapers-and-Content-Theft.php

Sign Up Questions The ability for bots to pass your security when a user registers is pretty easy for an automated bot, but you can pretty much stop an automated bot in its track when it attempts to register for an account.

Simply add a MOD or use your forum security control panel to place an original question that your users would know but a bot cannot easily search out within the sign up section of your forum. This method is usually very effective and can even put off the attempts of a human spammer registering an account.

Some human spammers will get through if they have time on their hands.

Changing the Flood Rate Spammers and Spambots have an ingenious way of getting into your forum by bypassing the registration process and ignoring Captcha. Although Captcha may put off one or two spammers it is largely ineffective at combating spam.

Spambots will flood your Forum in Seconds by using automatic responses to post in your forum. I am not going to tell you exactly how long your forum flood rate should be (The ability to post one after the other) but it should be longer than 20 - 30 seconds.

Your genuine users will understand this move if you explain it in an email to them. Most users who are genuine take longer than that to post in any case, Spambots usually in less than 5 seconds. So setting your flood rate to a higher level will go a long way to combating large amounts of spam from the same bot.

You will still get one or two spam posts but there will be nowhere near the amount you may have been experiencing.

Setting Up Extra Registration Questions If you have the ability to either grab a Modification for/or setup an extra question that you can change every week or so that is enabled during registration, then do it. This can confuse an auto-Spambot and can put off human spammers.

Look Out For Ridiculous Member Names That Make No Sense Names like 'DexBloldAllit' for example are not genuine, if you are not sure send an email to the registrant from an email setup to combat spammers, not your regular email. If you get no answer from them in 24 hours remove them.

Also look out for website addresses within signatures or user profiles. You will easily recognize the malicious bots from genuine user websites.

Remove The Ability To Use Signatures It is a shame to disallow signatures, but you can promise to allow regular users of your forum the ability to use signatures after a set amount of genuine posts. Genuine users will understand your reasons.

Limiting Links Within Posts For now you should limit links to one or two within posts. This will render many spam posts that get through as useless.

Word Censoring Censor words that are used by spammers such as 'Viagra' or 'Casino' and replace the words with 'Spam' 'Spamming Attempt'. That way your users will recognize spam posts, and so will you.

Conclusion There is not much you can do about some Spambots and human spammers, but implying any or all of the above will definitely combat the problem.

Just be vigilant, and protect your users, have trustable moderators and definitely look out for some of the nasty Porn bots.