(Yeah, it’s a slow day.)
A friend asked me to join a discussion forum. Then he gave me admin rights. I’ve been moderator on a handful of mailing lists and forums, in part because I tend to go after problems rather quickly. I have time and I’m proactive.
When moderating a forum with membership controls, one of the things we always hate is forum spam. Most of the time some weasel will sign up for a membership, then begin immediately posting crap with graphics and links. Their objective is not to advertise to the forum users; that’s not much of a market. It’s to create a large number of links which show up in search engines. This raises the profile for their spammy site. The first thing I do is delete their account, which has a switch to allow deleting all their posts. Nice trick, and it’s standard these days on the forums where I work.
Sometimes it’s a little more subtle. Perhaps the same person is joining dozens of these forums, not posting anything. Instead, they add a link to their profile which serves the same purpose. You have to actually check each profile to see if anything shows up. A few go so far as to post something innocuous, or perhaps even on-topic, but still their profile features links which are offensive. In the case of a forum set up to discuss Christian faith, it narrows the allowable topics a great deal, and it’s easy to spot purely commercial links.
Sometimes you just can’t tell. A good place to double-check is Stop Forum Spam. This is a place which keeps a database of profile details searchable by usernames, email addresses, IP addresses, and so forth. Yes, it’s possible there are false positives, and you can still decide to hold off deleting the account until you run a broader search. Still, I’ve found all the checks I’ve run so far to be a reliable indicator someone belongs to way too many forums, and too many different types of forums, for their membership to make much sense.
