How to Stop Forum Spam

Forum spam is one of the most common problem which a forum admin has to face. Most admins hire moderators to keep spammers away. But that involves manual work, which is has many defects. I mean whenever there is involvement of human comes in a system, that system will always be prone to errors! So, you need to know some automated ways to keep spammers away. In this tutorial I'll share the tricks to keep spammers away from your forum. But before I share those tricks, I need to explain different types of spammers. You need to understand types of spammers, because they are the cause of spam, mostly forum spam! There are many types of spammers, which can be broadly classified into two categories, which as follows,

• Spam Bots: These are the programs written specifically spam forums automatically. These programs, also known as bots, register in popular forums on internet and post on those forums with a backlink to the application owner. Mostly these bots write generic post, like thanks a lot for sharing useful info or great post, keep posting. But there are clever programs which can post intelligent comment/post based on thread title.
  
• Human Spammers: These are more dangerous than spam bots, as they come with artificial intelligence. These are usually people who try to promote there sites or are hired by somebody to promote others site. You will not believe there are professional spammers online! Some people do spamming for at least 8 hours a day and 7 days a week.
  

You need something to block both types of spammers. Most forum admins and moderator ban or suspend these manually. But if this come in thousands everyday then can you ban them manually? I don't think so. So, you need some anti-spam system for your forum. I'll be sharing tricks to implement these anti-spam system. But let me warn you, that these anti- spam system are not 100% efficient. They will help you in reducing spam by at least 80%! rest you need to do it manually. You need to implement following to keep spammers away,

1. Install Bad Behavior: Download and install bad behavior tool from Bad Behavior official Site on your site. This has access to database of known spammers. So, it blocks them from registering your site.
   
2. Use Stop Forum Spam API: stopforumspam.com has more than 49095077 listed in there database. It consists of ip address, usernames and email ids which spammers use. You just need to access there APIand check if user who is trying to register is reported in stop forum spam site or not. If he/she is reported then you shouldn't allow that user to register on your forum.
   
   
3. Use Captcha: Embedding complex captcha on your site will reduce number of bots registering your site. It is because bots are not very good at recognizing complex looking text/images. One of the best & free captcha provider is ReCAPTCHA.
   
   

In this episode, of this tutorial, I've listed tricks which involved using 3rd party tool. In next installment, I'll share tricks which you need to implement for your forum separately to keep human spammers and bots away. So, stay tuned to Webmaster Tutorials. ;)