Forum Spam

Generally the spambots will surf the web and it will search for guestbooks, blogs, forums and any forms to post the links which are of spam. It will commonly use OCR technology and most of the spambots will not target only the readers, it may also send a spam message which intends to boost up the search engines.

Forum spam will normally consists of links which redirects to external sites in order to increase the search engine popularity in related and competitive areas such as home and personal loans, real estate related fields. Generally the spam posts will contain a single link which redirects to various links and the text content of the post will be minimal but it will redirect the page to some unrelated sites. Some spambots can be cached using the automated spam filters. It will throw all the spam messages in one specified folder to protect the user from reading those messages.

In other hand, scammers can also post the spam link in signature field. In that case only the search engine spiders can find those spam links than the forum administrators. And also the spammers can easily predict the Email addresses in forum because generally in forum always some conversations will be taken place between the users. There are lot of chances in exchanging the mail address and lot of chances to do email spam.

Steps to get rid off from this forum spam:

1. The signature links can be limited in forums.


2. Captcha can be used to check whether the user is a human being or not.


3. Try to avoid new users who are using social networking ids.


4. Email verification can be set in order to complete the registration.


5. Time limit can be set for posts. Because the spambots will take much time to edit the old posts to create new.