How to keep spam where we want it.

[Leaf_It]

Its going to happen, and Poppycock seems to be the place where it is tolerated. Well that's great for us humans, but lets not forget about the others that will inevitably invade our small sanctuary. Bots. They don't know the difference between a spamming forum section and official places. We had our first visitor today. You can see them here. If certain precautions are taken this will happen very seldom, however if they are not, the bot user rate will raise. I have come from a forum that at one time was completely filled with spam. it was a very old forum that had not been very successful in its attempts at blocking spambots. Eventually a user joined that knew how to help. I am making this thread to save you the time it might take for someone like that to find there way here.

Every website/forum has a "pagerank" (PR) according to Google and the PR is calculated using different metrics, but the main metric to calculate is number of sites linking or mentioning about the site/forum. According to search engines (Google, Bing, MSN) a link to another site is like giving a vote (this site is authentic, good etc). If site called A has a link of our OML forum either through signature or anywhere in that site, OML gets a small value of site A's PR and authority vote, same applies here. So if a spammer leaves an anchor text link in this site, it means we are passing a small value of PR as well as domain authority vote to that link. This shouldn't be encouraged at any instance and in the long run search engines (Google, Bing, MSN) will take down this site because we are encouraging others to leave link and acting like link farm. This can really become a serious issue, and that's why I took my time to post such a lengthy post.

There are already few basic solutions: we can nullify their effectiveness by not allowing links anywhere in their profiles/posts until 5 posts are reached and 2 days have passed since making those 5 posts. At which point it should be very easy to detect spambots.
Yet another alternative is IP banning, since the accounts are likely created by a bot net, with enough IP bans the spammers will not be able to access the forums.
But there is one really effective solution to curb the spammers which should be done immediately i.e. add rel="nofollow" to the links. I think there is a plugin for most forums to add automatic nofollow to all links in the forum, however since this forums seems to be made by OML or at least isn't just being hosted by another company you should probably just add <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the header tag of each page. Once everyone comes to know that this forum no longer gives the PR and authority vote no one will spam with anchor text link in signatures/posts.

I hope this works. Maybe I'm just ignorant and you've already done this, but oh well.

Please Note: This will not solve all spam, but it will diminish it quite a bit. We will still get bots in other forms every once and a while.

[Solan]

if only spam didn't exist :(... as far as spam posts go, oml seems to have been doing a pretty good job getting rid of them (i've seen quite a few random seeming ones, now that i think of must have been bot or something.... or maybe just someone stupid).

[phrenikos]

Nice informative post!

I know if somebody is really targeting this site - IP banning won't be much help as some of these bot owners change IP frequently so they won't be tracked. (I'm actually a friend of a person who owns a youtube video dislike spam bot )

[Kamikaze28]

I find page rank nibbling a very arcane reasoning behind forum spam. To me, it seems more likely to get people to click links, just like in most email spam. While this forum (which is based on MyBB) requires a static captcha for account creation, those are known to be bottable/crowd-sourcable and do not provide a perfect protection against spam. There are animated captchas emerging, which are supposedly better at keeping bots out, but I have no idea how to put them in here.
From my experience, spamming will always happen for one reason or another. If your forum is popular, it will be spammed. Even though it is time consuming and tedious, the qualitatively best way to deal with it is by hand. I would like to emphasize the button under each post, which is meant for reporting spam, advertising messages or abuse. Reporting posts/threads will alert the admins to take action.

Account / IP bans are mostly ineffective. IPs can be changed quickly and easily and most spammers will just create another account to spam again.