Headaches of Forum Admin
One of the ways to quickly develop your site is having a forum. For example if you have a job related domain, you can start up a job related forum and go from there. The past few days have been very challenging for me. I run a couple of forum style websites, PetMessageBoard.com, OverseasContract.com also known as OverseasJobForum.com and petmemorial to mention a few. For some reason, over the past few days, I have been hit by the worst spamming ever. On petmessageboard, there was all kinds of adult content posted on the home page. Now that is sick. Petmessageboard is a family friendly website. The same for Overseascontract.com.
As I write this post, Petmessageboard is currently closed until I can clean up the member list. I have also resulted to moderating the membership and post. Why is this a problem ?
It is a huge problem because I do not want to spend all my waking hours moderating forums. This thing was set up so that they virtually run themselves (big mistake)
I post on them as time permits but with the recent unslot of spam, I am spending too much time moderating and going through the list of registration requests. Of every hundred, may only one is a legit registration request.
A couple of years back, I was forced to close down a rather successful petclassified section in PetHall.com because of spam and scam posters. I am tired of this never do wells and I am at my wits end. I have since upgraded my classified script to one of the best in the industry but I am yet to open the doors of PetClassfiedAds.com because it takes a lot of effort to get a classifieds or forum running.
In this times when I was going to focus my energies on developing my domains, I am not particularly trilled that I am experiencing this challenges.
What have I learnt from this? Well that is the question I have been asking myself. Aside from the fact that I have learnt more about the software that powers these forums, I am yet to take anything home from this. While I ponder, I will give forgiveness a try. Maybe If I write it, I will believe it ; “I forgive you never do well spammers”
Not exactly heartfelt but I am working on it. God works with all kinds of imperfect people. If he wanted just perfect beings then he would have stuck with just the Trinity. Even some of the angels would never have been created.
For me now, I am going to really work on my spirit of forgiveness.
Have a pleasant weekend
God bless you all.
2 Comments
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I sympathize completely. I run a poetry site, poetryinc.net and discovered very quickly that the p0rners, spammers, and internet trolls soon crawled out of the woodwork.
My forum is now contingent on member approval, which can be somewhat time-consuming, but you really need to keep on top of your forums. Someone who wants advice on pet care definitely does not want to witness, uh, human mating rituals in full color or ads for male enhancement drugs.
Well, anyway, good luck and welcome to the crazy world of forum administration.
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I am in the same boat. I have had to put several of my forums into maintenance mode because of spammers. Now I am thinking of doing the same as Ms Domainer.
Maybe there is a better spam protector out there.