Guest posting

Risking Spam to attract traffic.

[grelmar]

Partly to take this out of the phpBB attack thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

The single major issue that came out of that, was whether or not it's worthwhile enabling Guest posting.

My own take (if you read carefully through the above mentioned thread), is that it's too risky, you're opening yourself up to automated spamming, drive-by spamming, and all kinds of other risks.

The other side of the coin, and it's a perfectly valid argument, is that by allowing guest posting, you're making it easier for the "new guy" to come and join in, and if he sees and respects the responses he gets, as a guest, he/she will be more likely to join and become a full member. Used effectively, provided you have the moderators to be "on top of things" and able to kill manual spam quickly, and have the technology to block automated spam, this can be a good way to add community members quickly and easily, and to stir up traffic on a starting or slow forum.

I just know there are gonna be people on both sides of the argument here, and I wouldn't mind hearing your cases for and against guest posting.

[TheDoctor]

It depends on the sort of forum. There are probably a million different kinds, but to take two:

• There's the kind of forum like Webmaster World, where the usefulness of the forum is increased by people sticking around and bouncing ideas, etc back and forth. This sort of forum would probably not work with guest posting.

• There's a more casual kind, of the sort that I've been running for the past two years, where people are encouraged to post and run. I call this a "notice board". Most of the postings are of the nature of announcements, occassional requests for help - and really anything that you might find on a notice board for a given community. Here we've discovered that disallowing guest posting cuts down on the traffic.
  

So my answer is: identify what sort of forum you're trying to build. You can, of course, have different sorts side by side, and then you're going to have to deal with two (or more) strategies in the same board.

But, as I said in the other thread, if you do allow guest posting, you've got to have pre-moderation. IMO, this is a definite must. Otherwise you are just inviting abuse, sometimes - apparently - being carried out merely for the sake of the nastiness of it.

[chadmg]

If you think that your forum might benefit from allowing guest posting then you might as well give it a try. First make sure you have good spam protection and can handle the extra amount of moderation needed. You could try guest posting without moderation for a certain amount of time, then pre-moderated guest posting, and finally no guest posting. Then take all of your stats and adjust them for the amount of average traffic you received during the trial periods. Did the number of posts increase significantly by allowing guest posting? What is the perceived value of the guest posts? Did your membership go up significantly when there was no guest posting? Are people's attitudes different when membership is involved (are they more courteous)? Did you have to deal with any spam? With some answers to these questions you can decide what is best for your specific forum.

If you allow guest posting now, you might want to try doing this test as well to see how these changes effect your forum.

[rogerd]

In my experience, low-traffic forums can handle guest posting for quite a while. It's the volume factor that increases the risk - more links, more visitors, higher PR, etc. all increase the risk that the forum will be discovered by human or automated invaders.

On a site where I use a blog as a content manager, I was stunned to get an e-mail noting that I had a guest comment. Since I had completely removed comment ability from the templates, I was momentarily puzzled... I determined that a bot had detected the software and had accessed the comment script by direct cgi call. While the comment never appeared, I feared an avalanche of these robotic guests and promptly renamed the comment script.

Getting spammed is just a matter of time, so it pays to have your defenses in order.

[HughMungus]

I would only allow guest posting with restrictions (no images, no HTML/links).

[rogerd]

Those steps should help avoid spam issues, Hugh. Perhaps cookie-based flood control would help, too.