Why not disable links in posts for new users (say less than 20 posts). This will stop posts like this one.

It also seems odd that in the advertising banner at the top of the page there are often adverts for people to earn money posting links in forums like this - is there no way you can get rid of certain advertisements?

that will not stop them, mike -- they'll just make 20 completely useless posts first

i say this from several years of experience as a moderator at SitePoint Forums, a much more popular forum site than this one

regarding the adverts, it would be ironic indeed that dbforums bring the onslaught of "sig spammers" upon itself with ads

bad enough that these people already have a foot in the door through posts such as this one in the marketplace, a post which i have already reported to be removed as it has nothing to do with databases, but which still remains and my report remains ignored

Surely there is a cost to them - even if that cost is only time in typing in 20 more posts to finally get their links published. If you raise their costs by 20 times then it must have an impact.

You wonder whether it's worth keeping a database of the urls that are linked to. Then if any new post comes in with links to these urls then all links are removed and the user banned. Some process could be put in place to remove sites from the database.

Both the posts mentioned so far would of been handled by a simple "no posts until a certain threshold" rule though.

my experience as a moderator on a couple of forums where sig spamming is rampant shows that this is not the case

many third world companies have sweatshops of "seo experts" who sit there all day posting into forums, and believe me, a limit of 20 would be laughed at

a post limit does not control the problem, it exacerbates it

There has been talk around similar topics by the site admins and moderator staff already, however I have not been keeping up recently so am unable to pass a useful enough comment.

However, I have posted a link to this thread where such people will see it and hopefully gain some more useful feedback

Feel free to PM me to chase

r937 makes a good point. I just pitched the threads from gilbertsavier who was actually stealing messages posted on other forums to post them here with sig-spam attached.

The problem with forum spam is much harder to crack than just setting post limits. A lot of the spam is generated by bots, and much more is generated by the legions of "post for dollars" folks that aren't even computer literate enough to realize the damage that they do by posting this stuff.

DBForums has had a slow but consistent rise in terms of the hits from search engines and even more importantly by the number of times that DBForums is specified as the "site of preference" or even the only site to be searched for a given search engine query. As it rises higher and higher in terms of "search preference", DBForums becomes a more and more valuable target to spammers.

The folks that run and support DBForums do a great job of helping to manage the spam. I'm doing what I can to help manage spam too, but we are outnumbered literally thousands to one... There are ways to make a forum almost spam free, but those are very expensive in terms of the time, trouble, and money that it takes to use them... There are only a few forums on earth that can implement the kind of protection that it takes to really make spam impractical.

-PatP

thanks pat

once again, i find it important to draw a careful distinction between "spam spamming" and "sig spamming"

actual spam (posts for nike, viagra, handbags, etc.) are straightforward and easily dealt with -- in fact, automated methods are clearly possible here

sig spamming is far more insidious, and in my opinion you cannot automate the recognition of sig spamming at all

posts by sig spammers look an awful lot like real posts, except that their benefit to the value of the thread is nil

two typical examples: posts plagiarized from elsewhere on the web, and posts that say "thanks for sharing" or similar

control of sig spamming can easily be obtained by ensuring that sigs are displayed by the forum software ~only~ to logged-in users

this means that google and other search engines will never see sigs, which completely removes the incentive for sig spamming

remember, the reason the sig spammers post in the first place is to garner as many search engine backlinks as possible to the sites in their sigs

the more reputable the forum, the more value the search engine backlink

i urge dbforums to nip sig spamming in the bud before it becomes a more serious problem

Perhaps just having a button alongside each post (a bit like the quote button) that simply says "Spam". A reader clicks spam if he feels that post is spam. The mods then get a list (ordered by the number of spam clicks) of all the possible spam posts and you can then either :

• allow the post to remain
• remove any links from the post
• remove any links from the post and then ban the user
• ban the user and delete all their posts.

That way the bulk of the effort, ie check for spam, is done by regular users and you just make the executive decision at the end. Another option might be to have more moderators as well

That sounds like quite a good idea.

this button already exists, mike -- it is on the top bar of the post, at the right, beside the post number and the permalink

i use it all the time now that i'm not a moderator any more

besides, a post like the one you linked to (this one) is not actually spam

you cannot ask moderators to remove a perfectly valid post as spam if there is nothing wrong with it

again, i need to hammer home that there is a big difference between spam spamming and sig spamming

Oddly this wasn't the post I was originally talking about so perhaps I made a mistake though I'm pretty sure I checked the link (early stages of senility?).

someone removed the offending post, the link now goes to the first post of the thread

another example of sig spamming -- Web Crawler database design

a non-helpful reply to a three-year-old thread

check the sig link for a clue as to why that post was made

Edit: i was wrong, it's not sig spamming, because there is no sig! the poster has carefully disguised his link to ~look~ like a sig (this is called a "faux sig")

Insidious little buggers, ain't they???

-PatP