Forums are an excellent way to keep in touch with your customers. (Heck, you're reading one now!) It's a quick and efficient way to communicate on a mass scale. Many of our shopping cart software features have been developed after being posted as a feature request on this very forum. And after I finish hammering this article into my keyboard, I'll (hopefully) spell check it, save it to our forum, and within seconds it will be available to just about anyone surfing the 'net who stumbles across a link to it.
Unfortunately, this accessibility to instant publishing also opens the door for unsolicited, oft unethical posting of "information" as well: spam. True, if not for this spam, I never would have known what incredibly low mortgage rates I could get, where to get the best replica watches, how I could be slimmer by next week, and where to go to download the latest fake naughty pictures of my favorite celebrities! But several months ago the spam really started to get out of hand. We found ourselves deleting more than a dozen spam posts and fake users a day... and the number continued to climb!
"We'd spend an average of 1 1/2 hours a week
manually removing spam from our forum." |
Being a web software developer, we had the luxury of programmers on staff. Once we got fed up with the spam, we wrote our own custom application that scans our forum on a regular basis and automatically deletes spam posts and user accounts. A drastic measure? Perhaps, but we do save an average of 1 1/2 hours a week. Time spent manually uprooting forum spam is better spent on anything else... even writing about deleting forum spam is more enriching than being stuck wasting time deleting forum spam.
| Discussion: How do you combat forum spam? |
Many of our Modular Merchant clients run forums on their own website, but not everyone has the resources to write a custom script to to "cleanse" their forum. So, what do you do to combat the never-ending stream of spammers trying to get their international-pharmacy-cheap-rolex-lose-fifty-pounds-by-noon messages plastered on your forum? I invite you to post your tips here! The steps that you take may help other clients out there who are struggling with this, and wasting precious time on that could be spent on running their business. Let us know!
Modular Merchant's battle plan for combating forum spam:
* Visual confirmation during forum registration. (The registration process requires users to enter an ID code displayed in an image.) * On a regular basis, a custom-built script runs that scans our forum for posts and user accounts containing certain spam keywords. The posts and user accounts are automatically deleted. * The home page used by our Tech Support department also lists a summary of the newest forum posts and users. With a couple clicks, Techs can delete spam posts and users that the automated script misses. |
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CMarier
Modular Merchant - Shopping Cart Software
Specializing in digital delivery, subscription products, and add-on also available.
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