Spammy posts on your forum are bad. Constantly having to delete the spam from your message boards takes time away from interacting with your members and doing other productive work for your website, such as writing new content (like a blog post!) or engaging on social media. And perhaps even moreover, it takes away from the user experience on your website if your members have to encounter a lot of spam while they are on your forums. It can also give a bad impression of your website, especially if you are behind on clearing the spam. So that’s the issue. What’s the solution?
Like matters in life, it is best to get ahead of the issue and go for prevention first, to require less fixing action later.
One popular and well-known go-to method is CAPTCHA: require users to enter in a code to prove they are not a robot. But just requiring CAPTCHA for member and/or visitor posting (if you do allow visitors to post), is not a full proof solution. Most likely you also will not want to require members to have to enter in a CAPTCHA code for each post, as it can be a nuisance. You want to encourage visitors to join and for members to continue posting, especially those who are active on the forums, interacting and posting meaningful content – not dissuade them from wanting to post.
Brainstorming through ideas…So, how about allowing only members to post? No visitors. But how will you verify that a member will not post spam? You don’t really unless you know them or you have viewed one or more of their posts. And also, do you really want to not allow visitor posting? Perhaps, but why not just require admin approval of visitor posts and not lose on the extra traffic/user content?
We tackle spam on the UltimateWB software forum app by 1) Offering CAPTCHA options, and 2) Options in the post activation process. The post activation process is not just a simple “require admin approval of posts” process. You can set how many posts by a member must be approved before automatically activating posts. So you are not wasting time reviewing posts and your forum can house live interactions between members. And also at the same time you are making sure, through the reputation the member sets up by their initial posts, that your website member is most likely not a spammer. You can also set a value for how many posts by a visitor must be approved before automatically activating posts, if you would like. For visitors, their ip address is used to differentiate between them and other users.
Check out the UltimateWB forum app in action on our message boards here!
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