If you do any sort of interactive web design then you definately know about Spambots. So here’s a picture of one!
With mods and tweaks I’ve been able to eliminate most all (have only seen one in the last six weeks) of the spambot activity on my websites. Most frustrating is when people interact with the spambot thinking it’s a real person.
A spambot is an automated script that will post to forums, wikis or comments to blogs like the one you’re currently reading. They post links to try and increase their website ranking on search engines like Google. Since it’s automated, it’s sad that they do get quite a few out there that work short term.
How bad is comment spam on blogs and forums? My little blog here gets around 400 spam comments from bots PER DAY. Unless you have automated features in place to combat it, your site becomes trash in a matter of days.
What can you do about it? If you’re using WordPress, then just activate the Akismet spam plugin (Akismet comes bundled with WordPress). If you’re running phpbb, there are many mods you can do to cut down spam. The most effective mods are:
- Users cannot post links until they have 10 posts and have been a member 10 days.
- On registration, hide some of the non-essential account creation fields, like occupation and city. If someone tries to fill in that field, you know it’s an automated bot! I have my forums set to auto-IP -ban anyone (any bot) that does that.
- Authorize private message access only after a member has x amount of posts. I have this set from 3 to 50 depending on the community.
- I block the root url domain of any non-US email provider where I get the heaviest spam from. I even keep a list on my website of these domains, search my website for “phpbb spam domain list”.
If you’re interested in more info on spambot related issues, search my website for “seo”, “blackhat” and “spam”.
Have other steps you take to combat spam on interactive sites? Would be much appreciated if you let me know about them here as a comment. Thanks!