Re: Keeping spam out of forums
Akismet is a plugin that automatically determines if a post is spam based on certain criteria. That criteria though is set up for a blog, in which users (commenters) act differently than on a forum. Akismet will catch say a very large percentage of your spam (close to 100% of obvious spam), but has a tendancy to mark alot of forum posts as spam when they are not. These false positives generally occur with forum posts that have more than 2 links, are longer than 2 paragraphs, or from someone who has posted too quickly or too often for the algorithm to accept it.
It is really up to you and your particular forum whether you think Akismet is a good fit. I’ve disabled it on quite a few of my forums simply due to the huge number of false positives, and the feeling of hostility that generates from long term posters.
Captcha’s , of any kind, should be avoided if possible. Users hate them, and the data out there suggests that they’ve become fairly redundant in the past year.
Project Honeypot, and equivalent plugins, work well, but again have issues that hit a small percentage of users. If you have a small forum, that small percentage may be every easy to manage. If you have a big forum, its more of an issue.
Moderation is really the best way to beat spam, especially on BBpress. As Grassrootspa stated above, BBpress forums get an huge amount of people/spammers/fake accounts registering but not doing anything. I personally dont allow anyone from “.ru” or “.cn” on my forums, becuase they’re not aimed at that market, and that has cut down on a HUGE amount of my spam (and i apologise to anyone legitimate who has one of those email adresses). My other action is to spend 2 minutes everyday deleting users and their posts. Mass-Delete by _ck_ is a wonderful plugin that shows you the forum’s users ordered by actual useful info , god only knows why this functionality is not in the core, and you’ll find that this will allow you to handle alot of the spam very quickly and before it happens.
After about a month of one of my forums getting a large spurt of spam, i wrote a simple sql script on a page to delete anyone who matches very cimple criteria (12 hours between registering and activating, username included certain words etc). I set that up as a cron job to run every hour and now spam is non-existant.
Basically, if you want a spam free forum, and that forum is going to be a considerable size or easily found on google etc, you will have to think outside of the box and self-moderate regardless of the forum software used.
Take care,
Kev
