9 Ways to Eliminate Spam in Your Community Forum
Spam is the scourge of the internet and can do significant damage to your community if it is left unchecked. There are two kinds of spammers to worry about: spambots and human spammers. Bots are unintelligent software programs that automate the posting of spam and can usually be easily defeated since they are rigid in their behaviour. Human spammers present a greater challenge since they can bypass the traps that catch bots and can quickly change their behaviour.
We’ll start with the easiest and most tedious; alternate accounts. Commonly known as “alts” or “multinicks”, these users are a blight on essentially every board at some point. As the name implies, these are users who register multiple accounts on your board. Their purposes aren’t always nefarious; I can recall one user who started a dozen accounts purely because he couldn’t decide on a name he liked. He was aghast at the discovery that this was against our forum rules. There are also people who’ve simply forgotten their account info, or false IP check positives from roommates and partners. Like all users who essentially want to contribute, these are easily dealt with. 
This allows a member to fill out a simple form and immediately be granted access. This method of registration requires that the user provide a username, email address and password. It’s recommended to require email address confirmation to keep out Spammers or users with bad intentions. The form also includes a CAPTCHA to prevent SPAM bots from registering. 
