someone is taking the p*** with my new forum

[Rocky]

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> I setup a new forum and have a few members its only been online for 2 weeks now but there is another forum which has 1000s of members and they are posting ads on my forum.

I have had this problem on a forum I run, and I guess in some part Google are to blame for this nuisance by promtoing the idea that inbound links to a site help your page ranking.

Every day for the best part of two weeks I would wake up and have to delete FIFTY or more adverts posted - a real waste of my time and the spammers as they were only posted for eight hours at most.

The spammer in question just would not get the message he wasn't wanted despite me banning every IP he used, adding the IP address to the message, and so on. He or she seemed to have nothing better to do than assault my forum for up to 4 hours a day.

A couple of weeks ago I shut the forum down as there wasn't much more I could do with the in-house software we were using.

My plan is to re-open the forum using Yahooboards. Yes, Yahooboards are plagued with adverts too, but the adverts are provided by Yahoo, so at least they have a vested interest in keeping the idiots at bay.

I think I am right in saying that Yahoo boards have a number of features that will make it more difficult for spammers to operate, including:

* Pre-registration & cookie setting making it tedious to swap around for multiple account users.

* Limiting access to approved members

* Trial periods for new members

* Moderator message approval before posting

I would also like to be able to restrict the number of posts a new user can make to one a day perhaps, which really would make spamming much more difficult and time consuming. It does make for a very restrictive forum though and often puts off the sort of people you actually do want to post sadly.

So it may be worth you considering looking at using better software for your forum incorporating some or all of the above features, or perhaps farming it out to someone like Yahooboards. I certainly won't be bothering with an in-house software solution again.

If there are any entrepreneurs out there(!) you might want to consider starting a forum management business to take the headache out of running a successful forum for businesses and individuals. Cut me in for first million you make will you?

[renegade]

I have a forum on our site but it never really took off and I ended up talking to myself.

It was actually still quite useful as a place to link to to explain stuff and give hints and tips disguised as a visitor I wouldn't otherwise have felt comfortable with actually on site.

We should all be able to see both the benefits of a forum along with its limitations and liabilities just by hanging around here long enough.

[chrisuk]

I had a really huge forum, some 70k members and 10's of thousands of visitors per day. Battleforums.com was the name of the site.

It was a hobby site nothing more but at times is would consume most of the bandwidth and cause the most server load which then impacted some of my business sites. Secondly although I had moderators it became full of kids posting spam all over the place, never mind attracting record numbers of hack attacks. Furthermore because of the demographic it was very difficult to monetise.

Ultimately I sold the site at a loss but was grateful just to get rid of it as it had become more of an irritation than a hobby. Ironically the very thing that most people crave on a forum, traffic and community were the things that ruined the site, there was just too much for it to be managable.

Of course the amount of trouble you have depends a lot on your demographic but even on industry sites like a4u and wmw you get the occasional spammers. Equally if you manage the forum yourself you can find it becomes a full time job with big sites.

Some types of forum can be very difficult to monetise with appalling ctr on most adverts, especially on entertainment related forums.

So I won't be setting up another forum anytime soon but for those of you thinking of starting don't let me discourage you as it can be rewarding but your choice of subject matter is quite important in terms of the volume of troublemakers that may eventually come your way.

[stevenm]

As click rates are so bad on forums are there no advertisers who do CPM adverts for forums? For example I know Fastclick don't allow their banner ads on forums but do allow popups, intersitials and InVues.

Steven
--
Virtual Cards UK
http://www.virtualcards.co.uk

[loquax]

As click rates are so bad on forums

I think you just have to accept that a forum is not a vehicle for banner clicks and adapt to monetise it or take the view that it has value in another way.


Jason

[lukey]

I'd say adsense is surely the best way to go for forum advertising?


Luke

--------------------------
Netbasic Limited
www.netbasic.co.uk
--------------------------

[chrisuk]

I found even with adsense it was dismal. Popups worked the best as you were forcing them on your visitors but even then you had to make them session based else they caused more irritation than they are worth.

I imagine ctr on more professional sites than my hobby gaming forum would be a bit better, you would expect a more mature audience etc. Neverthless it is no coincidence that a good majority of ad networks have a 'no forum' clause, especially cpm networks.

No the best way by far is to gain niche advertisers, thus if you run a php resource forum you would try and attract php related advertisers etc. Thats the rough side though, you need to find these advertisers in the first place. Wheras on a network the advertisers are already there but not as targeted and thus poor ctr.

A better approach might be to take ads of the forum alltogether and use the forum to channel traffic to areas of your site that do make good money.

[goforbroke]

Forums are fun for whiling away the hours whilst trying to think of new money spinning ventures. Great way to get to know interesting people too.

Main problem I have at the moment is a certain person continually signing up with new user-names just so they can add their advertising link in the website link of their profile. Takes a couple of minutes a day to delete, so isn't too much bother though. I wouldn't mind so much if the person was a regular poster!!!

As mentioned before, forums are a great way to grab search engine traffic.

[bodykind]

I've been a moderator at a large forum (35k + members) for the last few years and we've learned that the only way to try and stem the abuse is to have a large and dedicated staff.

Getting people to care enough about the subject so that they will voluteer their time to moderate a forum is essential if you want it to be successful. Some subjects of course are easier to recruit for than others, the forum I'm involved in specialises in console gaming, sat hacking etc etc and it's no problem getting net savvy staff onboard.

[pricethat]

just add the url into a stop list, any posts containing that url or part of url does not get added and shows a rather rude feck off wid ya message (well perhaps not, but the first part would work)