Much like the world of search engine ranking, dealing with forums has a lot of mysteries, some that cannot be solved as easily as you might think or hope. Today you’ll learn two popular myths, why they exist, and some of the truth behind them. Like all myths they are based on small truths and may in fact become true for you, but are not a rule set in stone like many people pretend they are.

The Spam Trap

“Spammer robots only post in the last forum, so if you add another forum to your site and then make it invisible the spammer bots will only post in the invisible forum and you will never have to deal with spam!”

Oddly enough this can often solve major spam problems on popular forums, yet on others the bots won’t even post once. The reason for this may actually be a bit more complicated, if you look at most forums the last second will generally be Off-Topic or Free Chat. By posting here a spammer has a chance at having their thread stay rather than being removed within the hour removed from an actively moderated forum.

The problem with this myth starts when the Off Topic is not at the bottom of the forum, or even worse there is a Sales/Marketing forum. Since spam is in fact marketing the bots will often try and post there, though many marketing forums require a post count or membership length preventing them from doing such. In the end if you keep your forum simple and your Off Topic at the bottom you may be able to use this trick after you forum is large enough to have attracted many spam bots, but you’re just as likely to find it useless at the same time.

The blocked guest theory

“If you don’t allow guests to see your forum then they will be interested and join in order to see what’s going on. Just don’t forget to allow search engine robots to go through so that you don’t lose all your search engine rankings”

This one is simple. Don’t. By blocking the view of your forum, first your guests will be angry and frustrated that they are not allowed to even view your forum, most will leave, and some will try and get around it. That’s where part two becomes important. By allowing robots many advanced users will simply set their browser to give away the header from a robot, Google is a popular favorite.

There are methods for setting both Opera 9 and Firefox 2 easily with very few modifications and once set up they can be swapped for normal settings in a matter of seconds by going through the toolbars. There are methods to try and tell real robots, such as IP ranges (they generally start with 64 or 209), but unless you already knew this before reading this post you will probably find yourself in over your head.

The spam on my webmaster forum is not big yet. There are around 10 people banned because of spamming. The average is around 2 a week now. I need to upgrade soon

If you enjoyed this post, please Subscribe to my Feed

Share: del.icio.us Reddit Google Netscape StumbleUpon Technorati