Why do people spam forums

Eat3n View Profile View Posts. Why waste all that time asking a stupid question about stupid people to begin with? Originally posted by The Shoal :. Feb 18, am Yeah, probably referring to the badge spam. View Profile View Posts. Thanks for reviving this piece of art. Zombie View Profile View Posts.

Originally posted by Mr. Zombie :. Originally posted by an lol mellow merry xmas! It is done by posting usually automatically random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards.

Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer's web site artificially increases the site's search engine ranking on those where the popularity of the URL contributes to its implied value, an example algorithm would be the PageRank algorithm as used by Google Search.

An increased ranking often results in the spammer's commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers. Akismet - This is the original blog anti-spam tool developed by Matt Mullenweg. It works pretty well although every now and then innocent people get caught in the filters. Fortunately, there is an appeals process so that someone at Auttomatic will review your information and give you a reprieve, if they decide you really have not been naughty.

You should activate Akismet as soon as you install WordPress. Most Websites can get an Akismet API key free-of-charge and most of the remaining sites only have to pay a nominal fee to offset the cost of maintaining the service. Akismet will mark suspicious comments as spam and hold them for your review. You as the site administrator have the ability to unmark any comments you think are okay. Stop Spammer Registrations - This plugin checks the database at Stop Forum Spam to see if someone leaving a comment has been tagged as a spammer.

I have done this enough times to know it works. You can also set your plugin to maintain a local cache to reduce the amount of traffic between your blog and the database. You do NOT need an API key to use this plugin, but if you do get one you can report comment spam to the database and that actually helps you as the automated spam tools will keep coming back to your site and leaving more comments.

Stop Spammer Registrations also works with other services. Checks all attempts to leave spam against StopForumSpam. Linksleeve - If you're advanced enough to feel comfortable dinking with the code of your Website, you can a few lines of code developed by Virante to check the URLs left in comments against the various spam databases. Learn more at LinkSleeve.

For this technique to be effective, you must use simple but non-obvious question and answer combinations. For instance, "What programming language is phpBB written in? These questions are particularly effective on niche forums where one can ask a question that is not immediately obvious to the general populace. Though generally hesitant to suggest specific MODs or changes, this particular change has proven to be mostly effective against the current generation of spambots.

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