In many
ways, spam is just a fact of life on the Internet. Many of us get the
occasional spam email and have a filter to take care of it. Far and away, the
most common example of spam is email spam. While email spam is easy to avoid
and relatively harmless, if you’re running a website, you have to try and be
more mindful. Spam accounts on forums or even in comment sections can be a real
problem. Too many spam accounts can make your site look bad and make new readers
wary. Here are a few simple tips to help you nip those spammers in the bud.
The Captcha
One of the
oldest responses to spam bots is the captcha. A captcha is a basic response
test used to ensure a human answers the question. Normally it’s represented by either
an image including letters or a math problem. While a captcha won’t cut out
users who are actively trying to create spam, it will keep out bots and that
alone will cut down on your spam by a wide margin. Most websites require a
captcha when creating a user account, but that’s not enough. I recommend
requiring users answer a captcha every time they comment. It’s a little less
convenient for the users, but it will do a lot to keep your site clean.
Zero
Tolerance
This tip is
especially true for forums. Make sure you have a clearly stated zero tolerance
policy on spam. If ever you catch users spamming, new or old, ban them. It’s
important that the community knows you take the issue seriously and may ward
off a few potential spammers. Sometimes this works best if you can make an
example out of someone, so at the first chance you get, ban the spammer
immediately. Nothing is worse than having an interesting conversation thread
ruined by a spammer. Forums, perhaps more than any other type of website, have
a lot to lose from huge numbers of spammers. It’s also important to ban the IP,
not just the account. While it’s not impossible for them to return when banned
by IP, it’s more difficult.
Keep an
Adequate Moderating Staff
The larger
your community becomes, the higher the chance of being targeted by spammers. It
will eventually get to the point where it just isn’t reasonable to keep up with
it all yourself. This is where the importance of having a moderator staff comes
into play. If you take a handful of dedicated users you feel you can trust and
give them basic moderation power, your site may clean up itself. Often these
moderators will agree to help out of pure love for the site. Make it clear that
you’re looking for volunteers and are unable to pay them. You may be surprised
by the community response.
Require an
Email Address to Post Comments
Requiring an
email address to post comments serves two purposes. The first is warding off
spam bots and the second is forcing some responsibility. Often, when any
portion of the anonymity of the Internet is taken away, spammers avoid it. It’s
still possible to create an account for the sole reason of spamming your site,
but it’s likely not worth the effort. If this does happen, make sure to take
the email address and add it to a database before deleting the comment. You can
then keep a record of this database and use its emails to cut down on spam of
other websites you run.
Collaboration
Partner sites and affiliates are the lifeblood of
the blogosphere. You can make use of this to avoid spammers using the database
mentioned earlier. If you encourage your fellow webmasters to keep up a similar
list, you can compare the two and end up warding off more spammers. With a
large enough collective, you can create a joint safety net. This net works by
protecting the other sites in the collective from any single spammer. While it
won’t cut spam out completely, it will do a great job of cutting it back and
requires minimal effort to maintain.