May 23, 2005

Fighting Forum Spam and the Serial Spammer

Getting rid of spammers on one of my forums is a daily job for me. My Expatriate Forum has a reasonably high page rank, and probaly this attracts the spammers. I already tweaked the forum a bit, so people have to think twice before they can register on the forum. But the persistent spammer doesn’t automate his forum registration, and is not put of by the fact that a website cannot be entered in the profile or numbers that have to be typed.

I have a reasonable idea of what to expect from my average forum member on registration, and recognize the spammer allmost immediatly.

But sometimes its not so obvious, so some manual research has to be done. This means searching for the username used, and if its a name with a lot of results in combination with the word forum. This usually gives an idea if the user is regular spammer on other forums.

If there are still doubts, then I send a polite email. If this is not answered, no registration.

The score on the forum, currently, is that of all registrations, about 60% is a spammer, of which I send about 25% an email, and half of those is not replied to.

I already have banned some IP address, put a spam filter on forum posts, and while I think about it, I think that I could automate the spam detection of the registration for a large part. But it would require a lot of programming. So, see you tomorrow Mr Porn, Mr LinkPop and ScriptKiddies.

But please know, you are profiled every day, and one day I’ll write this beautiful script that will isolate you, so you can start your own forum, where you can wine with your follow spammers and hopefully one day realize that the Internet is about people too.

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