Almost overwhelmed with bulletin board spam

bulletin board, spam

[AKat]

I have a non-commercial site that accepts no advertising. I have a wwwboard for users and visitors to my site. I've always had a occasional problem with board spamming, but in the last month or so, it's gotten completely overwhelming. I am getting about 50 attempts a day to post spam on my board. It seems to be coming from everywhere, involving every sort of spamming you can imagine from the usual porn and selected drugs to things as mundane as kitchen pot racks.

Fortunately I have a good knowledge of PERL and I have put in code that intercepts almost all of these and directions them to an error log that I keep. Only about 2 or 3 a month get through to the board.

But the number of attempts only seems to get worse, and I have restrict my users more and more to what they can post there. It is just overwhelming me.

Is this becoming an internet-wide problem? I can't believe I am the only one having an issue with this. I can see it eventually killing bulletin boards if it continues like it is going now.

[jatar_k]

>> Only about 2 or 3 a month get through to the board.

then it looks like you are doing very well

It has always been a problem. If you use prerolled scripts then there are going to be more issues than something you make yourself. Though I don't think reinventing the wheel is a very constructive use of time.

hacking and slashing some of the forum/bb packages that are out there is the best option, which it sounds like you may have done already.

You always walk the line with automating spam removal as you said "and I have restrict my users more and more to what they can post there". You need to not overly restrict your users but still stop the spam. Moderators help, real human review can't be beat. There are other possible methods but it would depend on the activity level in your forum.