@Thornagol: Well, you can always nofollow the links of members with say 1k posts and below to further discourage this type of activity, but in the end if your forum receives awful many visits the spammer could just use it to receive direct benefit in terms of impressions/clicks and then the moderation is really the only counter. But if you don't want to invest much money in moderation, there are quite a lot auto prevention things that you can set-up to find yourself out of the 99% of the spammer's lists (even of those guys from India lol).
Oh yeah, there are a ton of things that can be done...on a modern platform. I inherited old software when I took over the team but we are going to be upgrading to a much more feature rich platform in the next few months. I'll be able to do a lot more without having to worry about being so hands on with moderation. Keep in mind, the limitations of preventing spammers and keeping the community clean depend a lot on what the platform is coded to do.
The only way for them to stop 100% of this stuff if for them to require moderation of every post.
Not every post, just the first few on the forum, which contain certain marketing keywords/links is enough. It's quite easy to do actually since 99,9% of the posts who trigger the spam keyword/link filters are actually going to be real spam and the forum loses nothing from not seeing them immediately. But if you want to screw the spammers more this atm is the better way although the forum quality drops, but that's another topic, which I doubt is the case lol.
We have really strict spam filters in place but I think the upfront restrictions depend on the tenacity of your spammers. Also, spammers use more than keywords to place their info in forums. They will hyperlink hidden characters, put junk in their bio fields, all sorts of stuff. You have to be able to review new members in their entirety to stop them from coming through.
In my forum, it's not uncommon for folks to post a handful of "meaningful" messages and then try to drop 60 threads on technical training in India. We moderate everything, unless you are a trusted source, such as a member of our company, a certified partner, or a VIP. It really cracks me up when pay for them to spam us because the person funding it is totally losing a ton of money by trying to use our site.
I run a community as my job and, even with captcha, they can get through. The only way for them to stop 100% of this stuff if for them to require moderation of every post. Luckily, I have people staffed around the clock to moderate our forums and keep the bad stuff out. It's very difficult to find the balance between openness and cleanliness. Think of it this way, the content in your community is a house. If you let anyone walk through it at anytime, then it's going to get dirty. If you screen every single person coming in, then it takes much longer for some of that dirt to come through.
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In my forum, it's not uncommon for folks to post a handful of "meaningful" messages and then try to drop 60 threads on technical training in India. We moderate everything, unless you are a trusted source, such as a member of our company, a certified partner, or a VIP. It really cracks me up when pay for them to spam us because the person funding it is totally losing a ton of money by trying to use our site.
I run a community as my job and, even with captcha, they can get through. The only way for them to stop 100% of this stuff if for them to require moderation of every post. Luckily, I have people staffed around the clock to moderate our forums and keep the bad stuff out. It's very difficult to find the balance between openness and cleanliness. Think of it this way, the content in your community is a house. If you let anyone walk through it at anytime, then it's going to get dirty. If you screen every single person coming in, then it takes much longer for some of that dirt to come through.