It seems that lately I have a bunch of spam posts. Even in a local forum? Maybe an International Spam Days
?
Glad that Yumi releases the
Spamalyser plugin. It helped me a lot to "fight" them.
This looks like a tower defense game, we fight spammes to protect our forums with the tools programmer kindly offer to us xD
From what I've seen, either they have bots that crawl around links for forums, or they just trawl through Google results for "powered by mybb" and spam everything there.
So if Google picks up your forum, spammers probably can too.
Most of them (spammers in my forum) are not a "smart" spammers.
They blindly put many links in their posts.
It's annoying to have about 200 posts like that for each day lately.
Now, I can "play" with the Spamalyser settings to block it.
They're probably the automated bot posters. Interestingly, human spammers seem to only target bigger boards.
Bigger boards will probably be moderated more so spam is unlikely to last long, but on the other hand, Google tends to crawl bigger boards more frequently, so it somewhat counteracts it. Bigger boards will also have more posts, thus, perhaps a higher chance of a spam thread slipping through - and when one does, it's a fair bit more beneficial than spam on a smaller board. So delegating smarter resources onto bigger boards make sense.
As for smaller boards, there's a higher chance that a spammer finds one unmoderated or rarely moderated, so probably more targeted by bots.
From my user tracking, I've found that most bots find your site via Googling "powered by mybb" or "inurl:showthread.php", so you could probably reduce the number of bots simply by:
1) Removing MyBB copyright or replacing it with an image
2) Customising the URLs a bit (either via SEO plugin or editing MyBB's SEF URLs)
Though I'm not sure how well the above measures would work on more established forums due to Google's caching.
It's a small forum with a local language. I don't use SEO/SEF URLs for the forum. I don't know that this effects it before
I will try to use it.