Perhaps the spambots can also gain access at the database level. In any case, they are a nuisance, and the destroyed chronological order of the threads seems to be irretrievably lost. ChatGPT found some Methods:
There are various measures that can be taken against forum spam to make life difficult for both spam robots and human spammers:
- 1. Activate Captcha in the registration form:
- Captchas help primarily against spam robots. There are different captcha systems, such as reCAPTCHA or question-answer captchas, where a user has to answer a random question during registration (1).
- 2. Use Stop Forum Spam:
- A service that collects reports of spam on forums, blogs, and wikis. These reports are then searchable and can be used automatically to block suspected spammers before they can post (2).
- 3. Set links to 'nofollow' and 'ugc':
- This signals search engines not to follow the links in forum posts, which makes posting SEO spam significantly less attractive to the spammer.
- 4. Demand email confirmation:
- Configure your forum so that a user has to confirm their email address after registration, and cannot post any contributions or other content until then.
- 5. Restrict the editing of posts:
- Limit the time for editing posts, especially for new users, to a few minutes to prevent spammers from initially posting harmless content and later inserting spam.
- 6. Manually approve new users:
- In smaller communities, it can be useful to manually check each new registration as an administrator and only release the user account after successful examination.
- 7. Activate Flood-Control:
- This allows a user to post only a limited number of posts within a certain period, which is particularly useful for new users to prevent a spammer from creating many spam posts in your forum in a short time (3).
These measures can be applied individually or in combination to reduce the extent of spam in your forum. The implementation of some of these measures may require technical know-how or may be facilitated by choosing suitable forum software.