How to Stop Spammers?

**Ascendancy** · 7 January, 2010, 04:17 AM

I run CAPTCHA and e-mail verification on my Kingdom Hearts Social Networking site (http://www.destinyislands.com/) but I still get spammers signing up to spam their profiles with links and stuff. It's wicked annoying to have to keep up with this, so I'm wondering what a good way to manage all of these spam profiles would be?

**Kovich** · 7 January, 2010, 04:37 AM

Could you integrate a question/answer verification system? Those are typically quite effective.

**Keldorn** · 8 January, 2010, 00:43 AM

Well you might want to just disallow clean links. Put link condoms on them. Like example.org/redirect.php?url=http://example.com
Sites like Deviantart.com, Myspace and Facebook do this.

**budhi1976** · 8 January, 2010, 04:14 AM

I agree with Keldorn, one of the biggest reasons for spammers are to spread their links, so if you do what Keldorn mentioned, it will discourage them.

CAPTCHA and e-mail verification are not very effective since there are many people selling manual submission service to do that.

Cheers,

Originally Posted by Keldorn

Well you might want to just disallow clean links. Put link condoms on them. Like example.org/redirect.php?url=http://example.com
Sites like Deviantart.com, Myspace and Facebook do this.

**ruben** · 8 January, 2010, 07:10 AM

make the links no-follow and they will have no reason to spam

Keldorn gave you a great advice over there.

another solution is to add a filter to censor common spam-links

**Keldorn** · 8 January, 2010, 20:38 PM

Originally Posted by ruben

make the links no-follow and they will have no reason to spam

Keldorn gave you a great advice over there.

another solution is to add a filter to censor common spam-links

I think its really sad. Myself I dont like the idea of it, but the spammers leave you no choice. Also Nuclear option, dont allow any links in comments Like youtube.

**javanx3d** · 8 January, 2010, 22:53 PM

True, the continuous battle of max freedom vs security vs spam and how to draw the right balance seems like it will be a constant battle online.

**Sami4u** · 9 January, 2010, 05:59 AM

Hi,

I don't know how to stop spam but I did see something I thought was cute. This webmaster made a page with all live links to all the email address of the peoples that spammed his site. And made sure the page was indexed. LOL

Butterflies Forever

Sami

**Ascendancy** · 14 January, 2010, 05:02 AM

I see... yeah I never really thought of just making the links NoFollow. I wish I didn't have to do it, but unfortunately I think that's the best way to make it so spammers don't even bother with my site.

**texashiker** · 14 January, 2010, 16:02 PM

The standard CAPTCHA phrase was broke a long time ago, you need to use at least ReCAPTCHA.

And then, find a "Stop Forum Spam" modification, that will help you out a lot. Go to the stopforumspam homepage and take a look around.