Moving from a warning system to a control system - PHP, forum spammers
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-12-07 15:14:49 - Graham EllisOur railway forum is every-popular - 30,000 visits per month (measured by Google Analytics, so that's pretty close to me saying "30,000 real visitors"), with the average visitor staying long enough to look at between five and six pages.
But, alas, our strong user base also makes us a sort-after target for "forum spammers" - people who sign up to forums to advertise their own products or the product of an organisation for whom they work. The admin team has done a superb job in filtering out these users who we can't accept because they would dilute the real content of the site to the extent that it was useless for its intended purpose, and over time I've added tools to help them pick out what's become the small minority of valid new registrations.
I've now switched from an "AWS" to an "ATC" type system - in other words from a system which warns the admin that a signup is likely to be spammerous to one which actually makes moves to control the spam by automatically blocking repeating offenders. And we'll see how it goes over the upcoming hours, days, weeks and months.
If you're reading this page because you've been directed here when you expected to find the "Coffee Shop" forum, and you're a member or you are interested in what we talk about, please send me an emaill - my email address is absurdly easy for a real user to find, and I'll see if I can sort you out. Quote "" to help me spot you in our log files. If you're interested in how I do it technically, this is one of the rare occasions that I'm not going to publish the exact details - but I will tell delegates how on our PHP courses, and I'm happy to tell past delegates by email too.