10

Is SPAM Killing the Blogtrepreneur Forums?

PHPBBI 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!

Comments are closed