Protecting Your Forum
by dodz

Don’t think you can come to the Internet and escape the reality of scum that we are confronted with in the outside world. There is no real way to patrol the whole Internet. Sure, there are laws, but like the real world not everywhere can be patrolled and people get away with things. We are going to venture into the world of protecting yourself online and find out how to overcome spammers, rippers and general annoyances. Prior to starting I’d like to note that I have dealt with all these things in the past, some more recently than others, my advice doesn’t have to be followed and I am not liable for any of your actions.

Spammers:
There are two main types of spammers. Commercial Spammers and Petty Spammers. Commercial spammers will post links to their sites, usually offering you their products. Sometimes products that we’d all not like to see, from viagra to penis enlargement. The way to deal with this type of spammer, which in fact usually a bot is to move all of their threads out of public view, ban them, IP as well as the email address. That is if they signed up. A lot of Commercial Spammers hit boards that are open to guests, as they don’t have to bypass a registering system. Although some advanced bots are able to do so. Developers are still trying to find ways to eliminate certain kinds of Spam bots, but extinction seems inevitable at this point in time as there are so many in development and so little knowledge about stopping them.

Petty spammers are those who are actual people, sad enough to site posting stupid content on your forum, site, and chat room or whatever. To my knowledge people using fraudulent details to spam are in fact breaking the law more than normal spammers. Why did I say that? It also ties in with rippers, posting the link to someone else’s site without their permission or knowledge and using other’s names to earn them a bad reputation. Pointlessness is posted, random combinations of alpha and numerical characters, as well as smiles and stuff that actually makes sense. Although sometimes, when it makes sense, it’s hard to spot if this person is just a genuine beginner or a spammer. Usually if it’s definitely a spammer you’re advised to ban them, username only if they’ve joined up. If they’re a guest, I don’t really think an IP ban is applicable, but most others do, so that’s up to you. This is because some ISPs us joint IP address, AOL for example, which is one of the most popular ISPs. You could in fact be banning a whole number of potential members/visitors.


Rippers:
Rippers, possibly the lowest of the lowest scum on the Internet. They take your work, they claim it as their own and they get all the credit. It’s like building a huge palace then someone saying they made it and gaining a national recognition because of it. Firstly what you can do to stop rippers is keep a PSD copy of all your work, this shows how YOU have done it. It’s advised you don’t upload PSDs of your work unless you’re very cautious of rippers. Upload your work as a PNG, JPG, GIF or whatever you want. Try and put your name on your work, or a small trademark and link to your site, so it’s impossible for the to steal the image unless they cut out a chunk of it and remake it.

Hot linking, as well as being a real nuisance, with people stealing your bandwidth, it may also help you to catch and get your own back on rippers. If you can monitor where your images are posted you could show the ripper up and give them a taste of their own medicine. By doing what we call a ‘switch’. This means switching the image they’ve hot linked from you with a different image. Now I usually discourage stuff like this, but having work ripped is a real pain in the ass. Make a new image, make it HUGE image, with unmissable colors, add text to it like ‘I RIPPED FROM [NAME HERE] OF [SITE NAME HERE] AND GOT CAUGHT! I’M A BIG RIPPER EVERYONE, HIDE YOUR WORK WHEN I’M AROUND!’ this will teach them a lesson and also possibly expose them. I know a friend of mine who was so cheesed off, because someone was ripping a whole set of forum images from him. He done a switch and replaced it all with porn, thus getting the ripper into trouble. I do not advise you to switch with porn, as really you shouldn’t be on it yourself.


General Nuisances:
There are hundreds of ways that people can be a nuisance to you, but it all depends how you can handle situations. I’m going to outline just a couple of the most common ones. Can I be staff? People asking to be staff on your forum or site when you specifically have told them you have a sufficient number of staff members already. People wont usually directly ask, they’ll drop little hints, best thing to do is as soon as you get a whiff of someone doing this, tell them ‘Are you too cowardly to ask to be staff?’ most times when I do that they never reply to the PM. It’s best to include in your forum rules that asking to become staff will not get you there and will get you put further back, this stops most people who actually read the rules.

The last thing I’m going to talk about is people who break the rules without knowing about it. We describe them as n00bs, but we were all one of them one day, it reminds me when people say I was never a n00b of when old people tell you off and you think ‘Were you never a kid’ These people can be annoying but it’s your duty to help them on their way to becoming a better member. If they have questions answer them, if they break the rules, point the in the direction of them, but whatever you do, don’t go power crazy and ban them just because they don’t know what they’re doing.




So there we have it. I’ve covered the things I find most annoying on the Internet, outlined ways to help you overcome them and given you some valuable knowledge, that you’re bound to need if you’re ever a webmaster/webmistress or admin. Bear in mind once again that I am not liable for any of your actions as an influence of this article.


Last Edit: Apr 19, 2007 1:05:29 GMT by Kay