In this article I’m going to review why an unattended forum getting used for spam, can lead to resource usage problems for your account.
What is an unattended forum?
An unattended forum is considered one where there is not daily or at least weekly moderation of the new user sign-ups, or the new posts that are getting posted on the forum.
The reason why this can be problematic, is that if you end up with a lot of fake user registrations, there can be a lot of resource usage used up while running all the scripts to handle the registration of these users. Also if these users sign up successfully, they could then fill your forum up with spam content.
When your forum is filled with spam content, this can increase the size of your database, cause slow loading, and also possibly damage your search engine ranking if the spam content is left in place.
An unattended forum is also a common cause for an account suspension, so it’s important to be aware of the impact leaving an unattended forum on your account can cause.
How to resolve spam issues on a forum
A lot of the time a forum will have been setup for community discussion, but then because of time constraints of simply lack of interest the forum no longer gets used by the moderator. If this is the case and the forum is simply not being used by the community of the website anymore, simply completely removing the forum from your account should help stop it from getting used for spam purposes.
If you still would like to keep your forum active, but just clean up all the spam, then you’ll typically need to go through and remove all fake user registration and their posts. Then you’d want to ensure your forum is utilizing a CAPTCHA system for account sign-ups to help prevent automated bots from signing up for new accounts.
If you notice that your forum is always having fake user registration attempts, or spam posts, from certain IP addresses you can also block unwanted users from your site using .htaccess to prevent them access from even getting to your forum in the first place.
