Category Archives: Forum Spam

Email, Forum Spam

How to Spot a Forum Spammer

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One of the biggest threats to any forum or website is spam. There are thousands of people from all over the world whose sole job is to find unprotected sites with the aim of spamming them. We use Akismet on this site but we can’t protect our new forum this way. Here’s how we keep the forum free from spam.

First off, here’s a link to our forum: GTWorld.ca One of the games we play is the Gran Turismo series and this forum is purely about that. As you will see, we’ve set up a two-step registration process. First, a forum administrator must approve all new registrants. Second, anyone who wants to join the forum must send an email containing their Playstation Network ID in it. We get an email when there is a registration request. We then head to the forum to check. Here’s what we see:

Photo of Inactive Users/New Registrants
New registrants are classed as ‘inactive users’ until we approve them.

 

 

 

If we click on the username, this is what we see next:

Photo of Inactive Users/New Registrants 2
The username and email are there. Let’s see if the email address is from a spammer. Highlight it and click copy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The email address sounds legitimate. Why do we suspect that it isn’t? Because we have not received the user’s PSN name in an email, that’s the first clue. We copy and paste the email address into Google. Like this:

Photo of Spammer Revealed
If the email address has been used before, we’ll find that out here on Google.

 

 

 

 

 

We’re in luck. This email seems to be quite popular on the most popular spam checking site, stopforumspam.com. This is the report we get when we click on the first link:

Photo of Spammer Identified
Yay! We’ve identified our new registrant as a spammer. Into the trash bin he goes.

 

 

 

 

 

Even though the email says that the user is from the United Kingdom, this site tells us that he is really from the Ukraine. That in itself is an important piece of information. Now, if you think that this process is a waste of time, we have to say that we get multiple spam registrants every day. If we gave these people access to our forum, it would be full of spam in a very short time. We think it’s worth it.

Thanks for reading! Questions or comments are welcome. You can also ask questions on our Facebook page. Here is the link: Computers Made Simple on Facebook 

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