I wanted to highlight this topic to all Blogtrepreneur readers, as I think its a very disappointing and saddening topic. For a fair few months now, the Blogtrepreneur Forums have been online. While it’s safe to say that they havn’t grown as much as I’d have hoped, I still find myself involved in a conversations with the site’s biggest fans and contributors. Along with myself as moderator, there are 3 people who I feel deserve some credit for keeping me company: so thanks to Dave, Paul and Fred.
Unfortunately, these seem to be the only people around in the forums. But please note that I am still totally appreciative to everyone who leaves comments here, we still have great commenters - but my main philosophy in starting the forums were to turn it into a place where all my commenters could talk and converse together.
There’s worse. Everyday I find myself having to spend a few minutes deleting spam. These spammers make their accounts in their forums and often link to adult or drug-related websites, whilst making posts covered in links to their crappy sites. It really annoys me. I understand that these people might be making a quick few uniques, but really, do they have no morals?
Also, my other PHPBB forum ChipandChat.com also does not seem to be doing very well, and also experiences regular spam. The main problem here is, unlike many other popular forum software (like VBulletin), PHPBB makes it really hard to delete spammers’ accounts. Paul told me how to delete the accounts once, and it does involve journeying into the realms of MySQL. Whilst the procedure is relatively straightforward, it is time consuming, and I just cannot spare the time to go into my hosting account everyday.
So now I am faced with a dilemna. Do I carry on with the Blogtrepreneur Forums and delete the spam accounts once in a while (I am able to delete the actual spam posts easily), or do I completely shut down the forums? Obviously if the forums were really active I would definitely keep them up - but seeing how they are inactive for most of the time, Im wondering whether it’s really worth the unprofessionalism (as people would get put off seeing spam). At the same time I am unwilling to pay the VBulletin registration fee at this time.
I want your opinion. I would really like to continue with the boards and see them grow so that it would eventually be worthwhile getting VBulletin. Please support this idea by registering and posting if you can - so that we can all share the knowledge and expertise that so many of you have. If you could do this, I would be extremely grateful. Thanks for listening!
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10 responses so far ↓
1 Chris // Oct 20, 2006 at 12:04 am
Do you think you could use the new forum tools by Word Press?
2 Mad Samurai // Oct 20, 2006 at 3:59 am
I don’t find phpbb too hard to manage at all. Visit the phpbb.com forum and you can find all the help and awnsers you need. There are also many addons available on their site that make it harder for spammers to abuse your site.
If your interested in a pro active option check out my new site http://www.spameaters.org
We are aiming to go on the offensive instead of the defensive.
3 Aditya // Oct 20, 2006 at 10:00 am
Hello adnan
I have been running a phpBB forums for a year by now. Do two things on your forums -
1. Remove the website field during registration so that new users are not able to enter their website in the profile.
2. Enable E-mail activation. I know you wont think of doing this since you think that you will loose members. But the actually this way you will get more quality members who actually post.
My forums is
Entertainment India
regards
aditya
4 Paul // Oct 20, 2006 at 10:00 am
I find the spam accounts annoying as well, as I get at least ten signing up each day for Rogue Students and it’s a real pain to delete them all. What’s worse is that I use user activation on my forums so an email gets sent out for each registration, and if someone registers with an invalid email address I get all the bounces.
I would second Chris’ suggestion of trying bbPress though, at least give it a quick whirl to see how it works. I haven’t tried it for a while, but development seems to be coming along at a faster pace now so it might be ready for proper use.
5 Dave Starr // Oct 20, 2006 at 10:44 am
I really don’t know what I would do if the decision were in my lap. I feel the forums could grow to be something useful but it would take time that you likely don’t have. And forums have little to offer in the way of revenue potential.
I have a site planned somewhat in the future where I think a forum is going to be part of the mix but I haven’t gone into the source selection process yet. I know nothing about administrating any of the common packages. I do, though, have a lot of experience moderating on a pretty active forum .. ~4000 members and ~2000 messages per month and that experience is the chief reason I do nothing with them now. Once you reach a certain critical mass you’ll have substantial work in dealing with the members who will always consist of a few that are unhappy with any decision you make and/or will ‘push’ any rules you wish you try to apply. Advice? Ask yourself seriously what you hope to accomplish and how much of your time it is worth.
6 adnan // Oct 20, 2006 at 11:51 am
Thanks for your comments Guys.
Chris - I looked into the forum provided by Wordpress because their added option was that you can have built in protection by Akismet. However I found the forum design was not very pretty and it would take a bit of customisation in order to make it look nice. If anyone could help me out with making the Wordpress forum look good that would be awesome!
Mad Samurai - your site looks pretty interesting. What methods are you going to use to fight spam? I havn’t really looked at the add-ons yet, this is something I should probably do.
Aditya - thanks for those 2 recommendations. I have done both now! And thanks for signing up!
Paul - I’ve just added User activation for the forums. Is this actually a bad idea? I wish there was another way lol. I might have a look at bbPress. I also know some people who use Vanilla and that looks really nice and pretty easy to use. I also really like the software, check it out at YoungGoGetter.com and just scroll down a bit for the forum. Tell me what you think.
And Dave - hmmm, what I really wanted to achieve was a huge community where all website owners/bloggers/entrepreneurs who read my blog could gather and talk about related issues. I basically just wanted to have a community where everyone could ask and find answers for their online questions. I suppose there are a lot of forums which already have this. I don’t want to compete, I just want my own small community. Maybe this is unrealistic - I won’t know until I achieve the community feel Im after, and once I experience the admin side of the forum.
Thanks for your suggestions. I have disabled adding websites now to the forums (so sorry for all you “real guys” who had links to your sites there). I have also enabled user account activation, but this is probably going to mean more emails for me! If anyone disagrees with what Im doing and if they could point me to some cool mods or add-ons that would be cool.
Thanks,
Adnan
7 Mad Samurai // Oct 21, 2006 at 2:33 am
I am just starting this project and don’t have the game plan completely laid out yet. I am looking for as much input as I can get to find as many ways to get to the spammers as possible.
One idea is to have people submit the URLs of spam they get and then reasearch the most commonly submitted. Find as much contact info for the company as possible and hopefully have enough people interested in my site who will mail, email, call these people enough to get under their skin.
You can find the name phone # and email for whoever started a website on whois.net. One thing that I have found is a lot of these less than legitimate sites that are known to spam give phony info. I want to find out if there is any way to get these fradulent sites shut down.
I also get a lot of spam that links to a blog with their info on it.
I want to try to work with big blogs to make it easier to report these spammey blogs and hopefully find other ways to deter spammers from using blogs.
There are also a lot of spambots out there. I want to see if there is any way to track suspicious bots and or trap or disable known spambots.
These are my best ideas so far.
8 adnan // Oct 22, 2006 at 7:41 pm
All these sound like good, pretty simple ways, but It looks like it could take up a lot of your time.
Bloggers like me would submit at least 30 spam comments/emails to you to analyse and if there are a lot of us Bloggers, that will mean a lot of analysis from you. If you can find a way to automate this procedure that would be awesome.
Also, I think spambots are the worst. If you can find some sort of way to send a virus to these machines and mess up there spamming systems / cause a bit of criminal damage - I don’t think anyone will be complaining
Im looking forward to the launch of your site, so please don’t forget to let me know when it’s launched and I’ll be sure to put in a little plug for you on here. Thanks for explaining mate.
9 Mad Samurai // Oct 23, 2006 at 5:18 am
“Bloggers like me would submit at least 30 spam comments/emails to you to analyse and if there are a lot of us Bloggers, that will mean a lot of analysis from you. If you can find a way to automate this procedure that would be awesome.”
I would want to set it up so an automated system would tell us the URL of the most commonly submitted spammers first so if five of your spams were from buyourpharmiesnow.com and four were for blackjackpokeryoucoldwinyourassoff.com and three were from superextremeporn.com we could then focus on the worst causes of the problem. The rest would end up lower on the list and we could work our way down.
The more I get into this subject the more antispam orginizations I find working to fight it although almost all of them do seem to focus on email spam. I see now that my first step is trying to make these other orginizations more acessible and trying to work with them since they are deffinately a step ahead of us overall. Hopefully I can get some of these orgnizations to think more of form, blog and other forms of online spam.
There is one org that I have found that seems more interested in the spammers themselves than the fact that it is sent through email. they are http://www.spamhaus.org
These guys really seem to be on top of the big picture, whos doing it, who’s hosting it’ and what to do about it.
I am working on a links section of my site that makes these other orginizations more acessible.
My theory is the easier it is to reoprt these spammers the more likely more people will be motivated to do something about it.
Thanks for your kind words. I am looking for people excited about this and every one I find helps move me and http://www.spameaters.org forward.
10 adnan // Oct 24, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Yeah having an automated system with it “ranking” the spammers would be a good idea.
There are quite a lot of antispam organisations and it would be nice if they could use all of their resources to target one job at a time instead of diversifying so much. That would mean we could tackle one problem at a time.
No problem mate, good luck with your site and keep us up to date!
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