Managing Spam is Crucial

[Donna_Kx]

Probably one of the most damaging things for a website is spam. Search engines hate spam. Members hate spam. Spam posts tend to be nonsense, with hidden links. Some can look like legitimate posts but also contain those hidden links promoting whatever site they want to promote. If you don't keep your community clean from spam, you'll find your SEO dropping and your site can possibly be banned from Google and other search engines. Not only that, your members may leave if they get frustrated with fake posts and fake members. 

The best way to manage spam is to manage who you let on your site, who you let post, and what kind of posts you allow. Depending on the software (framework) you are using for your website, you can have different tools at your disposal. Here are some tips for fighting spammers:

1. Use reCAPTCHA - provided for free by Google. It's a great tool to help fight spammer signups. 
   
2. Set up free or paid subscriptions. Most website software I've used allows for subscriptions. I use that to help control spam by setting up a free subscription which spambots tend not to sign up for. 
   
3. Use member levels to control who can post. For example, set up a general member level (named whatever you want) which can only do basic posts. If possible, set the posts to require approval before they go live to the community or blog comment, etc. If your software has settings to auto move members up based on post number, you could set up a system where it takes x number of good posts before the member moves up to a level where they can post more and without the approval restriction.
   
4. Control which members can update their profile info (in many cases, spammers will use the About to hide their links), 
   
5. Control which members can contact other members (spammers will spam your members if you aren't careful - this leads to losing members).
   

Hopefully those tips help get you on the way towards keeping a clean site with limited spam. Nothing can 100% protect your site from spam. You'll need to be diligent in your spam fighting efforts if you want to succeed with your site.

[Tiffany_Kx]

Spam is a real issue, agreed.  I do like your ideas for setting member levels, and putting those controls in place on new member posting permissions.  Some admin control panels have a very complex ability to control members posting permissions.  The challenge with admin's on these platforms are to really know when you set a permissions in one way, how it affects the member entirely.  I think that's an area that some platforms have over complicated member settings.

I've seen the work of spammers many times abusing the profile section by populating all of their spammy links and such.  That's a good point to control member profile settings, at least for the new member until you are certain you have a real person and not a spammer.