Jolt Country

Ben's BBS, which probably has fewer readers than even my blog, has been found by the spammers, who have, like the infamous "jellyfish eating the catfish" story, flooded the place with garbage posts.

I had to lock mine down because they just flooded it with garbage. As I note on my blog, if they at least had something to say, even if I disagreed, I'd leave it. But it's nothing but garbage to evade anti-spam scanners and links to allegedly paying link spammers. But some of the posts didn't even do anything! They didn't go to working urls and they did nothing but fill up my blog with the on-line equivalent of roach eggs.

I finally had to load it with electronic boric acid to keep them out.

If I could have figured a way so that any posting with .cn in it was blocked to look like a fake post, I'd probably have knocked off 90% to 95% of the spamposting.

Controlling forum spam is simple to do. All you have to do is control (a) who can post and (b) who and how people can register.

Obviously in regards to who can post, if you allow anonymous posting, you will get spammed. That's really all there is to it.

In regards to having people register, I require new users to post the answer to a simple question that you have to look up to find. It forces human interaction. This stops all automated attempts at attempting to create new user accounts. All of them. The other step is, I keep new users in limbo until I validate them. This stops the human spammers. I have a field new users must fill out to justify why I should validate them -- I look for things like the names of my books or where they would have heard about the forum from.

Obviously this would not work for a forum that gets hundreds of users a week, but I get about 3 a month and it works great. I have over a hundred users and have never had a spam post.

Also, most modern forum programs allow for the blocking of e-mail addresses or IP ranges. Those things are easy to circumvent with free gmail accounts and proxy servers, but it would keep a few of them out.