I volunteered — noticed that one of the forums didn’t have a captcha on it, and let him know. He installed the captcha, and his spam problems disappeared.

BTW — if people are interested in putting up a forum — and shied away because of information about phpbb — should really check out phpbb3. PhpBB3 actually paid to have a security audit done on it. As of the last time I checked, it is the only free forum software to have done so.

I’d also encourage folks who have a phpbb2 forum to upgrade to phpbb3

You’re absolutely correct about “something others would want to link to”

I posted a response in a forum and was dumbfounded when I saw it coming up on the first page of Google.

Until then I didn’t even know Google was crawling forums.

I was looking up the same subject as I posted several months later and couldn’t believe it!

Of course some of the best info is in private (paid for) forums. And most always the owners keep the spiders out of them.

Anyway, great post! -Tina

These days, despite the eyestrain, I’m shifting more in the direction of groups hosted on Facebook and other social network sites.

–>This has been the *cornerstone* of my own business for 13 years.

Shel Horowitz, author of Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World and six other books.

You’ve done a great job in putting that together with the design, etc.!

John

As you know, at http://ablakeforum.com we tackled the spam issue using a couple of those techniques… we use captchas, double opt-in, and vigorous moderation by the admins as well as expert moderators.

We also ban spammers who do get through within minutes of their postings. Seems like such a waste of their time, doesn’t it? Once they post a spam message, their account is banned by username, IP address and email. They are doing it manually, so I’m not sure what they see is the payoff.

As for backlinks…
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said. I think posting topical, relevant material with lively discussions is the perfect way to get backlinks. I don’t know of any other forums in our niche who utilize video, social media and other “new” technologies to bring subscribers, but i do know that we are growing at an astonishing rate! Our list of backlinks is inspiring, after only a month - and helps us to know we’re on the right track.

Cheers!
Lisa

Spam is always a problem with forums. There’s generally 2 ways I handle that.

1) Have a good moderator team that logs in regularly and polices it. Sounds like you’re doing that now.

2) Use anti-spam mods and addins, like captcha and the math mods. Even with double opt-in confirmations of new users, people unfortunately still do that so they can set up their spam automation software.

My forums use Snitz (for Windows servers) and SMF (for LAMP platforms), so I’m familiar and experienced with the mods for those. I played around with phpBB a few times, but I never got to the point where I installed any mods.

So I confess I’m not as experienced from the admin side of phpBB as the others when it comes to mods, but I’ve certainly USED many phpBB boards as a poster/user.

But I know they all have similar anti-spam mods. Blog mods like Akismet would be ideal for forums, because then we only have to worry about the non-automated submissions, which almost always require human intervention to keep at bay!

Yes, solid advice there. Since I run a “support” forum I’ll try that out. Even though it’s technically a support forum for my software membership site…it wouldn’t hurt getting lurkers there who may be interested in the software due to the conversations that happen there.

As long as we are on the subject of forums (and since you have experience in this arena) I’d like to know how you combat forum SPAM which seems to be a bigger issue.

I’ve recruited 4 forum members to be moderators and delete the junk and I’ve resorted to approving all new members first. I run a PhpBB forum…

Any suggestions? Maybe you could make a blog post about that in the future.