How To Prevent Spam On Your Internet Forum Board

Spam in forum boards consists mainly in two activities, that are the following ones:

• Spam Threads
• Spam Member Profiles

Spam threads are new topics in which spammers put lots of links, usually pharmacy drugs and sex related, in order to obtain links for their websites and gain some traffic from the search engines.

This activity, apart of being illegal, it is totally deprecated because it promotes website that may potentially sell dangerous products, scams or could even bring to phishing sites.

Moreover, letting those links stay alive on your forum board may let your pages on being penalized, if such links are categorized as “bad neighbours” from the engines.

Last but not least, users seeing too much trash on your pages won’t return on your site anymore, and you will progressively lose traffic along with having your content quality drop to nothing.

For such reasons spam prevention is essential in order to keep your forum board tidy. Therefore the main question is: how can you achieve the goal of preventing spammers infest your forum board?

First of all, you will need to moderate your board by yourself or having some dedicated moderators in order to delete spam threads when these appear. If you are using PhpBB you should find a hack to add a thread report feature so to make your regular users help you in the spam prevention task.

Also, if you want to avoid people to sign up just to put their spam website on their profile to be shown, you should activate the email confirmation on your forum script. Both PhpBB and vBulletin are supporting this feature.

Manual activation of the accounts from the forum admin may be an idea, but this would slow down new memberships and could be an unsustainable extra work from your side.

You could even remove the possibility to add a website on your members’ profiles but this could limit your legit users, and you want your community to have all the benefits you can give them.

A good solution may be to remove the live links from profiles and the member list, and this can be easily done with manual modification of your forum script. It is easily feasible on PhpBB and vBulletin as well.

If you don’t know how to do this, you can contact a professional forum promotion firm and make them do the job for you. For instance, my company is doing such jobs for the public.

About the Author:
Alessandro Golkar is the founder and CEO of ForumBoosting, the forum promotion and enhancement firm that established its operations in November 2005. They are helping forum owners to kickstart their board and revive old ones, putting fresh content on them, and making a proper search engine optimization on their pages. Paid forum posting is the main business, along with forum seo.
Article Submitted On: September 24, 2006
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Those Annoying Spam Emails

Commonly referred to as spam, unsolicited commercial email is becoming a big problem today. If you’ve ever had your email address on a spam list, then you know how annoying it is to have to wade through dozens of advertisements to get to the mail you want to read. Although there are laws in place, it is unlikely that people who send spam will adhere to these laws so your best defense is to filter as much of it as you can through software and protect your email address from being added to more lists.

What Spam Looks Like

Usually the emails are from some fake looking name and many of them may have subjects that try to lure you into opening them by promising a stock tip, pretending to be your friend or acting like they need information for an application that you never filled out. When you get an email like this that seems suspicious it is best to just delete it.

How Did They Get Your Address In The First Place?

Sadly enough, most spammers got your email address because you gave it to them! Sometimes when you order something your email gets sold to a list, but most times it is harvested from a web site. If you have your email listed in an online advertisement, on a website or have published it in a forum, it is likely that it will be harvested for one of these lists.

Unfortunately, once your email address is out there you will not be able to get it removed from their “list”. There is no point in replying to the spam or trying to use the unsubscribe button as the spammer has no intention of removing you from his list and in fact, by acknowledging that you received his email you are giving him incentive to send you more mail and possibly sell your email address to other spammers. Your best defense is to get a good filtering software and filter out as much of it as you can.

Protect Your Email Address

One thing that you can do is get a second email and only give that out to people you want to receive mail from. Reserve the original email for use if you need to have an email to order online or subscribe to a site. Other things you can do include:

Not answering spam emails
Never have your email address visible on any web page
Do not use an auto-responder when you will be away from your computer
Do not pass along chain emails

About the Author:
Lee Dobbins
Visit http://www.spam-canned.com to find out more about spam and how you can protect your email address. Browse the free article database at http://www.spam-canned.com/spamarticles1.html
Article Source: www.iSnare.com

All About Spam

Spam is annoying. Period. Why people would want to send all of us stupid messages about buying prescription drugs or getting some outrageously good mortgage rate is beyond me. Well, not really.

You might ignore those emails. But not everyone does. And that's why they're sent. Emails cost so little (or nothing) to send. So sending out a million of them could be a cakewalk. Let's say one out of every 1,000 recipients falls for their ploy. Someone just got 1,000 new customers!

How in the heck did those spammers get your address in the first place? Well, they actually use a variety of techniques. They use programs called spambots to search the web and pick up any email addresses that could be listed on websites. They use what's called the "Dictionary" technique, where they take a well-known email extension (earthlink.net, for instance), and make up all kinds of possible user names to go with it. For example, with me they could try the usernames "kara", "kara1", "kara2" and so on, until they can confirm one of those connected to an earthlink.net extension is a valid email address. Kinda like going page by page through the dictionary.

Ever fill out a registration form on a website and find a little checkbox, probably near the bottom, asking if you want to receive additional information, newsletters, or something of that nature? Often the box is checked, and in order NOT to receive the info, you have to UNCHECK it (or else). Well if you miss those types of boxes on the wrong kinds of sites, your email addresses may be handed to spammers on a silver platter. Well, almost. Often a zillion email addresses are sold for next to nothing to spammers on CDs. (Couldn't you almost call those silver platters?)

Many internet service providers (those guys that keep you connected to the internet so you can send and receive email) use a variety of methods to block spam before it ever gets to you. Nevertheless, we all know that some spam inevitably gets through to our inboxes. That's when we need to take a proactive stance and install some sort of software to filter it out!
© 2005 by Kara Glover

About the author:
Kara Glover
For help on installing anti-spam software, check out this article on Kara Glover’s website: http://www.karathecomputertutor.com You can also find more articles, tips and tutorials on topics such as Microsoft Word., Excel, and PowerPoint there. Kara is a Computer Tutor and Troubleshooter.
Feel free to reprint this article in newsletters and on websites, with resource box included. If you use this article, please send a brief message to let me know where it appeared: kara333@earthlink.net
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URL: http://www.karathecomputertutor.com
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date of copyright: March 2005
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