Andem - 2:20 pm on Nov 23, 2010 (gmt 0)

>> ... Spam on forums is relatively easy to control. OK, I'm going to get some flak for this, but I genuinely feel that it's not a big problem. I run a forum myself (in my profile) which is about a year old now and has near zero or zero spam. Further, the mods have hardly any work to do from one day to the next.

It isn't easy to control when they specifically target your forum at times of the day when your moderators are sleeping. They literally show up minutes after the moderators log off and spam away. The next morning we end up deleting up to hundreds of messages spread across threads under many different user names all coming from various countries including Brazil, China, India and even sometimes the U.S.

>> The simple truth is one that forum owners are reluctant to accept: If you kill the account of any new poster who makes a fluff post, you'll eliminate most spammers.

I hate fluff posters and even when some of our regulars post fluff, I just delete their posts and pm them asking for less of that.

>> 1. Tie in with stopforumspam or someone to block known spam IPs from opening accounts.

I currently use Akismet. It actually does cut down a lot of forum spam.

>> 2. Make clear that all facilities on the forum - from access to editing a profile to signature links to PMs to even posting are privileges and need to be earned (and accounts keep getting moved up the ladder based on account age and number of posts).

Got it! All users with less than a certain number of posts are automatically filtered with Akismet, have no PM privileges and lack access to doing many things. In fact both postcount and age of account are taken into consideration.

Spam still manages to get through, unfortunately. They are also usually with a common user agent like Firefox or MSIE.

>> You just create an account, you do not spam the forum or blog.

Completely absurd. You leech off of other peoples' resources if you create these profiles. Either way, every external site on our forums are nofollow. Unfortunately, most spammers are too lazy to bother checking or they just leave everything up to automation; unfortunately I believe most of our spammers now are doing it manually.