Community Building Articles

Types of forum spammers

Spammers are the enemy.

OK, perhaps that's a bit melodramatic, but they are the bane of forum admins. You can argue the ethics and morals of spamming 'till you're blue in the face, but when it comes to your forum, ethics and morals go out the window. It's your world, your rules and your baby!

This article will look at some of the types of spammers you will come across when running an active community.

What is a spammer?

In the context of discussion forums, a spammer is someone who registers and posts their business / website details with the sole intention of promoting it. This is the basic definition of a spammer, however there are varying degrees of spammer.

In the context of your forum, you should form your own definition of what constitutes spam. How much self promotion are you willing to tolerate? Where is the line drawn between useful information for your regular user and bandwidth hogging junk.

In order to make this judgement, a forum admin must be aware of the types of spammer that are out there:

Drive by spammer - this user will register and post only once - something along the lines of, "Hi folks I just came across this site that might be of use to you all......", blah blah blah. Basically they are attempting to subtly give their own business interests a good referral.

Just so there is no doubt in your mind - people don't do this. Average Joe surfer will not register on a forum solely to tell your community about a great site he found. It just doesn't happen!

This type of spam brings nothing to your forums. This type of user won't be back. You will lose nothing by deleting their post and banning them.

Scatter Gun Spammer - this user will register and post the same post several times, usually in different forums. The general idea is that more exposure on your forums will mean more referrals for him. In reality, your users are no more likely to visit his site than if he posted once - in fact most are less likely to visit his site after having to put up with his multiple posts.

Ideally, nobody should be posting the same post multiple times on your forums - you wouldn't have the same article duplicated on your site, so don't have duplicate posts. Your moderators should be deleting these duplicate spam posts as they happen. It should also be noted that regular users do have the tendency to cross-post in multiple forums - they also believe they will have more chance of a response. So you should be careful when labelling this type of user as a "spammer" - they may simply really want a response!

Scatter Gun Spammers bring nothing to your forums, and only cause work for your moderating team. Delete and ban them asap.

Spam Angels - these people lay on the line between what's acceptable and what isn't and it's up to you as a forum admin to dictate their limits. A Spam Angel is someone who is knowledgeable in your subject area (or at least thinks he is) and will be the first to respond to new questions and participate in discussions.

This in itself is very good for your forum - you want more people doing this. But these people will take every opportunity they can to refer your members to their own site / business. If someone asks about widgets then your resident Spam Angel will offer them some basic info and refer them to his widget sale site....

Now here comes the hard part for you - you need to decide if the member's overall contributions to your community outweigh the self promotions. If he is regularly ignoring your rules, then perhaps a private word will solve the problem. If not, then you may have to take more forceful action.

You also need to consider what is more important for you - the ethical standards you want to set, or the information being provided to your users. Sometimes both are compatible, sometimes they are not.

Subtle Spammers - we are now entering the realms of subtle spam and this is the area that can snowball and cause problems for forum admins. Basically subtle spammers will register and build up allies within your community - they will contribute lots and make themselves well known.

Subtle Spammers are like long term versions of Spam Angel, but perhaps may have not been so blatant about their self promotions. They will make references to their own experience / business / website / whatever within discussions - they won't give specifics, but they will hint strongly enough to try and encourage other users to request more details.

The problem for forum admin is that you need to decide how much these people are manipulating the discussions on your forum and if this is adversely effecting you or your community. Keep in mind, these people are well respected, long term members of your community and the rest of the community simply will not understand your reasons for conflict with them.

You must remember that if you do take forceful action against them, then you will not only be losing an active community member, but you also risk causing major drama within your forums, which can potentially mean the loss of more members.

More often than not, Subtle Spammers contribute a lot to a community and only take out a minimal amount with minor disruption. It's up to you how much you want to allow people to use your community to generate their own business.

Tag Team Spammers - sometimes more than one person, sometimes the same person posting under different usernames. Generally, Tag Team Spammers will initiate a discussion (or hijack an existing one) and use it to promote their business / website / whatever.

There are two ways this can be done :

1. Both "users" will back each other up in arguments - maybe both will offer glowing referrals about a product or a service.

2. Both "users" will disagree with each other, thereby controlling both sides of a discussion (and indeed, perpetuating it indefinitely for ongoing publicity).

Either way, it can be hard to spot and even harder to prove. It is very easy for a large community to turn on the admin / moderator team and rest assured there will always be someone else ready to take over and setup a new community in your place.

You can always use IP addresses, Email addresses, similarities in language used, usernames or common sense to catch out Tag Team Spammers though (if 2 "users" are unusually positive about a specific product / service, then alarm bells should ring).

Conclusion

One thing that should be remember is that people can and will change. Just because someone arrived at your forum as a "Drive By Spammer" doesn't mean that they won't end up as a valued member of the community (more likely a "Spam Angel" though!). So don't start tarring people with the same brush.

As you become more experienced as a forum admin, you will see these types of spammer crop up over time (and other types too).

Advice I would give though is not to make too many enemies when starting out. It can be as beneficial to foster spam (ie, allow some amount of self promotion) as it can be to ban it completely. After all, spammers are users within your community as well! Most won't affect you much either way, but some can easily turn into your best friend or your worst enemy.

A liberal, open minded approach is good - err on the safe side for the time being, but don't be concerned about laying down the law if you need to. A community is a hard thing to develop and should you successfully build a thriving community, then you are within your rights to defend it as you see fit.

You are the one who is in control of it, not your users. Yes, they are important, but don't lose sight of the hard work you have put in - your community is there because of you.

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