Eternity SW

From here to eternity

Being a few words describing an ISV journey …

2007-05-15 : The War On Spam

As I posted previously I wrote my own forum software. This was principally because (a) I got fed up taking FOREVER to wade through phpBB in order to delete malicious forum spam, and (b) I could.

Now although I know it's pretty arrogant to expect that with little anti-spam knowledge I can out think the millions of full-time spammers, however, it makes an interesting experiment. As such, I have some stats to share on how successful I have been.

Firstly, has the amount of spam increased? Yes I think that it probably has. Unfortunately I didn't keep track of how much I have had to manually remove with the new forum, but it is of the order of about 4 posts/day. This is comparable to when I was using phpBB. And I'll try and keep better records of this from now on.

Secondly, has the anti-spam software blocked any posts? Yes. It has so far blocked 114 posts in the 46 days it's been running, or roughly 2.5 posts / day.

So I am seeing about 6 spam posts per day at the current level of traffic to my site, and given how few people actually post to the forums, I wonder if I'll continue to run a forum at all! Guess that's food for another day's thoughts.