How to deal with scammers and spammers on your forum
Hi guys,
I am currently in the process of creating a website similar to IH. I was wondering how I can stop scammers and spammers from posting on my site.
my site only allows you to post text and share links....So no images ..
Here are some suggestions:
Set up a minimum reputation score requirement before allowing the members to post. This score could be earned by commenting, and liking/upvoting other posts.
Empower your members to report toxic elements (both members and content) in the community.
Blacklist certain keywords including profanity. If your forum software supports AI-based content detection to report spammy posts, hate speech, etc., you could leverage that as well.
Ensure that the links shared are not "do follow" by default. This reduces the incentive to post links.
Keep a rule for link sharing (e.g., 10:1). This means for if a member is sharing 2 links to the same domain, the member would need to share 20 links to other sites.
These are some things on top of my mind. Will add more if I come across anything else.
what do you mean by "do follow"
Basically every instance of text that users can write on your site should have
rel="nofollow"on any links that appear. Otherwise spammers are going to make posts on your site that link to their sites just so you pass on some link juice in Google's eyes. Worst-case scenario, your site will be mentioned on lists that spammers pass around and will probably never be taken off, so even after you fix the issues, you'll still get spammers signing up and posting.Well, links in forum discussions should be marked as "UGC" based on Google's guideline.
You can learn more here - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify.html
amazing!
The stopforumspam api can prevent some signups.