A “spambot” is an automated program that is used to find discussion forums with the aim of registering and posting a pre-defined post.  The purpose of this is to use forum profiles, signatures and post to add links to back to the owner’s site.

As we know, there are areas of link building that are deemed to be “unethical” and this is one of them.  Automated posts are a nuisance for forum administrators who need to take the time to review posts and moderate (edit or delete) inappropriate posts.  Plus, many sites which use spambots for link building are in highly competitive areas (such as casinos, porn or pharmaceuticals) which can lead to users of the forum being exposed to inappropriate content.

Spambots tend to target specific types of forums, so as an addition to our SEO tips section, I thought I would add some advice on protection your phpBB forum from spambots.

Tips to protect your phpBB forum from spambots

  • Don’t allow guests (unregistered users) to post.
  • Update phpBB and activate captcha authorisation (done via config in admin panel). This displays a random image (with text in it) during the registration process that users need to type in to register. Not a problem for humans but bots have trouble with it.
  • Remove memberlist.php (or replace it with a blank page). A lot of spam bots go unnoticed because they simply register and use profile URL to get their link. Removing memberslist.php doesn’t stop them but it screws them which is almost as good!
  • Delete or alter the phpBB reference in the footer - some spam bots use search engines to find this string of text to select targets. Doesnt stop all bots (some work from a list of existing forum URLs). You can check if this is happening via referral stats.
  • Add a new variable to registration process - a simple question with toggle box answer - “are you human?” yes / no. Bots are pre-programmed for standard forum setup so will hit a wall with this.
  • Use swearword filter to censor certain phrases - URLs of sites that spam and common spam words (porn, casino, viagra, etc). Wordpress has a nice list of spam words (http://codex.wordpress.org/Spam_Words).
  • Activate admin authorisation of new users. A little time consuming to do for busier forums though.

Hope this helps.  It is important to take action against forum and blog comment spam - the less effective we can make it for the spammers, the less likely they are to do it.