The spam on my board has gotten really bad and I hate it because a lot of it advertises porn and I have gone through great lengths to make my board safe for all ages. I have a couple ideas on what to do about it but I want to know if, as advertisers, you feel they are fair:

1) Create a guest account where people can login to post their ad.

2) Create a board that is not visable from the forum index but linked with a forum redirect (I can explain that further if you don't understand) in hopes to confuse bots...

3) Make an off site advertising board.

I think the last two would work. I am not sure how much the first would deter bad spammers. They can post using accounts that are coming through a proxy. So they could continue to be a problem even if you tried to ban the IP's.

So these advertisers aren't robots?

Most of them aren't but some of them are. But I think they all try to do as many sites as quickly as possible, I have a ban list a mile long but it does nothing to help.

Quite frankly, I haven't had that problem yet, but would like to hear what others have to say to solve it. *observes* ^_^.

How on earth did they get to your site anyways o.O

The more hits a site gets and the more active your board the more spammers you attract so I here. We are in search engines, board listings, ect. I am sure they find us the same way members do.

As for what I have done, I put moderator approval on the forum so their are 5 people (including myself) who will be checking the board for new posts, that way the spam should never make it so anyone can see it. Do people think this is fair? I have explained why on my board and I will add it to my ads with a little blurb like:

"I am sorry for the inconvience to administrators when advertising but to due a lot of inappropriate content being posted on our advertising board ads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted for viewing. If you do not wish to wait to see your ad posted you can feel free to delete our ad."

I've seen it before too. Some of these bots are particularly sophisticated.

You can try a few tricks, such as requiring them to enter a date of birth (which can confuse some bots), require email verfication, use image verification, or moderate all new members (require validation).

Other than that, if your site is marked for spamming through bots, there's not much you can do other than prevent bots from signing up or being able to post.

Another idea is that registrants are only allowed to post in one forum until an admin changes their usergroup.

I'm not having problems with signed up members, I am having problems with my guest friendly advertising forum. I still get the occasional bot but I have already taken all of those steps to reduce them.

If you can, make all advertisements in the advertisement forum require moderator validation. That's how a lot of sites do it for those who have advertisement problems.

There's obviously no way to stop a bot or malicious spammer from posting their spam if it's free to guests, you just need to put more intermediaries in the process.

As I have already posted, that is what I have done and asked if people think this is a fair solution.

I got tons of spam bots on my forum. They learned how to post pictures, and well . . . it got special. I was forced to turn it to admin validation because bots can go around member validation.

How about having the admins of the other boards join (using admin validation) and then delete their accounts after they post their boards. It's a little confusing, though.

You honestly made it sound like you have people policing the board. That's probably the best policy, but that is significant overhead.

I don't see how it wouldn't be fair. Inconvenient, as administrators of other boards would need to wait longer for their ads to be up, but fair.

Other methods you could try is that you only allow one link per post; many spam bots post numerous links.

The main problem you have to identify is whether or not these are bots or people. If they're bots, add intermediate (but clientside) steps for them to post a thread. I put it so that all guests posting must click a user agreement before they can post as a guest. It eliminates anyone who isn't a human.