Fake forum registrations – why would anyone do it? Most fake registrations include a website link in their profile, which is then published in the forum memberlist when their registration is submitted. Spammers take advantage of this to help improve their search engine ranking (Google is an important search engine which uses ‘relevancy’ to rank a listing. This includes checking for links from other sites) and drive traffic to their website.
There are two main types of spammers – bots and humans. Bot spammers are usually the easier of the two to deal with. Visual confirmation is one of the most effective weapons. a randomly generated set of numbers/letters that have to be confirmed by a person manually typing the information into the registration form. Changing some of the common file names and variables can also be effective against bots.
Much harder to foil are human spammers. These are people who seemingly spend all day visiting forum sites, filling out registration forms to get their website link ‘out there’.
One forum site I manage is run on the popular phpBB forum software, and gets several fake registrations a day. After implementing the visual confirmation option, enforcing Admin activation only and making some other small anti-bot changes I’ve realised the only way to slow down these spammers is to make it impossible for them to include their website link in their profile when they register.
I utilised this MOD to remove the website and signature fields from the registration form. I’m keeping my fingers crossed with this that it will cut down the rubbish.