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Preventing post spam

Spamming is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. The spamming process is usually automated by programming a machine to post the messages.

Spammers can be the biggest nuisance for any forum, but Website Toolbox helps protect yours by automatically detecting and preventing spam posts. Known spammers are automatically detected and banned from accessing your forum. Additionally, posts that are highly likely to be spam automatically require CAPTCHA human verification. We use sophisticated spam filtration using spam IP address, email address, and email domain detection, machine learning, bot & proxy detection, blacklist enforcement, human verification for suspected spammers, and more.

You can further increase spam protection on your forum by using one or more of the following methods:

Preventing guests from posting

Preventing guests from posting on your forum is a great way to prevent spam because most spamming technology is not intelligent enough to understand that it must create an account before posting.

Human verification

Human verification, also known as a CAPTCHA, is used to verify that a human is signing up an account rather than an automatic spam robot. Depending on how suspicious the user seems, the human verification may be as simple as a check box or as complex as choosing from a series of images.

This feature can be enabled by following the directions below:

  1. Log in to your Website Toolbox account.
  2. Click the Settings link.
  3. Click the Users link.
  4. Check the checkbox next to Human Verification.
  5. Save your changes.

Your forum has a built-in security feature that will automatically prompt users with a human verification if their sign up looks like spam. Therefore, it is recommended that you only turn on human verification if you are having problems with spam on your forum.

Email address verification

You can enable email address verification to ensure that users sign up with a valid email address. When a new user signs up for your forum, an email will automatically be sent to the email address they specified when signing up. The email will contain a link that the user must click to verify that the email address they provided is valid. By default, they won't be able to post topics or replies until they have verified their email address.

Post approval

You can enable post approval to review and approve or decline posts before they go live on your forum. You can choose to approve all posts or only the first few posts made by a user. Choosing to approve the first few posts made by a user is a useful way to stop spammers who create accounts for the sole purpose of posting spam. After the first valid post by the user, you would know that it is not an account created by a spammer. You can also optionally only approve the posts that contain links. For example, if it is the user's first post and it also contains a link to a website.

Member approval

Enabling membership approval will allow you to approve each user before they can begin using your forum.

Forum password protection

You can protect your entire forum or a specific category by specifying a password. This way, only you and the members of the forum will have access to your forum.

Prevent signups from a country

If you are receiving spam signups from a specific country, you can configure your forum to disallow signups from the countries you specify.

Only allow signups from specific countries

You can contact us to only allow signups from specific countries. Please list the countries that you'd like to allow.

Censor words

You can censor words that are appearing in the spam posts to prevent them from being used in future posts.

Require two-factor authentication

To help prevent spam, you can require that users set up two-factor authentication in their account. Two-factor authentication (2FA) uses two separate methods to confirm a user's identity for authentication. One is their password and another is a 6-digit code that is generated every 30 seconds by an app on their phone. The majority of spam bots aren't sophisticated enough to use two-factor authentication. As an added benefit, two-factor authentication will greatly enhance the security of users' accounts.


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