How to Stop Forum Spam - Anti Spam System Implementation

How to Stop Forum Spam - Anti Spam System Implementation

This is second chapter of How to Stop Forum Span. Before I specify agenda for this tutorial, let me make it clear that the tools which I mentioned in last tutorial are no way related or coded by me. If you want, you can use alternative tools like fassim (another anti-spam system) as well. In this episode, I'll discuss methods you need to implement on your forum. It has nothing to with use any 3rd party tool or implementation. So, prerequisite for implementing this tutorial is to know coding related to forum.

I'll be listing few tricks, you can use one or all of them together as anti spam methodology. Now, without further delay I'll start listing tricks you need to implement on your forum to keep spammers away.

• Activate account after Email verification: Whenever somebody/anything registers your forum, you need to send an automated mail with activation code to the email id, used to register the forum. For implementing this, you will need smtp server or a service which can do this automatically.
  
• Send password to Email ID: When user is registering to your forum, never ask for password. Send a separate mail (different from activation mail) to users email id which has randomly generated password. Make sure you send this mail at least after 10 minutes of users registration. It is because many users/bots use fake email id valid only for few minutes. So, if a email id isn't valid or expired then that user will not be able to login to your forum. This is the one the full proof way to keep fake or spammers users/bots away!
  
• Have limit on Posting URLs: You need to put a threshold on number of post a user should post before posting a url or image. It can 10 or 50, it depends on your choice. It does have evil side, that is, genuine new users who want to share images or genuine link will have restriction to post. But you have to deal with that, as this tricks keep spammers away! Also, if a user is genuine he/she will probably will come back to your forum again and again and ultimately cross threshold to share useful stuff.
  
• Don't allow new users to have Signature: You need to implement some threshold for putting signature as well. I mean once user crosses that threshold, he/she will be eligible for having signature. Or you can allow every one to have signature but only after crossing threshold they will be able to use url in there signature ;)
  
• Award good members & Moderators: Have a report button/link (just like this forum has) after every post, so that moderators or reputed members of your forum can report spam post. You can have contest for good member who reports genuine bad post. It will help you curb spam effectively!
  

There are few more ways to stop spammers, but if you implement tricks I shared in this installment and previous tutorial then you should be able to stop more than 80% of spammers. Rest can be taken care by moderators and reputed members.