Bulletin board overwhlemed with spam

[spidersites]

Hello
I have a forum www.ukfreepages.co.uk/forum. I dont do anything to promote this forum. It was set up to promote support for my business.

For some reason i have a lot of people signing up. Around 20+ people a day. Membership is currently running at just under 7000 people.

Its an SMF forum.

Despite having moderation enabled I still recieve a lot of spam. Recently this has started turning into hard code porn from Russia. I hope that this is hidden otherwise I could get in trouble with my hosting provider.

I Delete all spam and ban the user on username and IP address but this doesnt seem to be helping much.

Im wondering is this kind of spam a problem for other board owers?

What can I do to overcome this problem? I am considering shutting down the board completely.

I also dont know why im getting so much traffic. Is this traffic a good thing? or a bad thing? - ie I can mailshot 7000 registered users.

Thanks in advance

 

[RBS]

There is no need for duplicate thread...

 

[spidersites]

Sorry Couldn't amend title spelling mistake!

 

[ServWise]

SMF and many of the other forum software have script hacks that are automated to sign-up a user and post spam. I suspect most of your members are fake. You should have a setting for authorising users via an email link that should stop most forum spam. (Most will use fake emails so wont get the authentication email.). you'll still get lots of sign-ups but they wont be full members so it should curtail the spam emails.

 

[spidersites]

Thanks. Already have email confirmations set up.

Also have the read password image when joining set up. Thought this was robot proof.

How can I prevent images being added? Should stop the porn marketers

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

Richard,

I have a SMF site and have a similar issue - it is a pain you just have to handle if you want to grow, but put as many steps to avoid bots as possible e.g. captcha.

Asd for traffic, if people are not posting or you are not getting revenue, what's the point!

 

[davek17]

Yes this is an issue as SEO marketers will use cheap foreign workers using Angela's links etc to create backlinks for businesses.

What these guys are doing is signing up manually as an actual human being and then using the link in their profile as a backlink. The better your site/page Rank is the more SPAM you'll get trying to syphon off the juice! The issue is very hard to beat as actual humans are doing this not automatic bots. What also makes this worse is that you can pay these guys twice and they come back and post a thread 3 months later which makes the link much more permanent because you think its real and to all intents and purposes it is actually real. You see the same on here from time to time when someone posts an advert or very weak question. The more people reply, the more important the page can become in SEO listings. Maybe asking UKBF how they deal with it might be a good idea?

You can switch off backlinks which might help deter these people and make sure you use _noFollow in your pages that will be a setting somewhere i'm sure.

Hope this helps

 

[JustJohn]

Your forum is out of date and requires upgrading to the latest version.

SMF is plagued by spam, you would be much better visiting their support forum and reading / ask for advice there.

You will have to add mods (bad behaviour etc) to cut back on spam. It is a full time job running any forum, if you are not getting any benefit from it you would be better deleting it before it affects your business.

PS Most of the members will likely be spambots, putting up notices not to post spam is futile.