Aloha Carrie!
The SPAM and SPAMbots are a real problem on all forums. They concentrate on forums because busy forums usually get good rankings in the search engines. By registering they are able to have their website link that points from a forum with a high ranking to their site which helps give that site a better ranking. The better the ranking the easier the website can be found and the more people who will visit. They will usually post once or twice because most admins will delete accounts that don't participate.
The reason it is getting worse is due to the fact that people in poor countries can be paid very little for registering and putting a website URL up on a forum. Why Albania more so than other countries I am not sure. I get a lot from Russia as well. There are some precautions that can be put in place to help prevent these people from being able to post. None of which are fool proof.
The worst offenders are the SPAMbots. These are programs running on a computer somewhere that can fill out a registration form and even post something. If your forum gets hit by 20 or 30 of these a day it can take as long as an hour to sift through all the new registrations trying to determine which are SPAMbots and which are real people wanting to join. And then what do you do when you figure out it is just a bot and person trying to just get their website URL on your forum? There are ways of blocking them in the future but it takes even more time to deal with controlling this problem.
Given that this forum does not accept advertising and therefore not make any money for Rob you have to give him a lot of credit for wanting to keep this forum up an running considering the extra work he has to go through.
Regards,
Dave
The Kona Forum
http://www.konaforum.com
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former". --Albert Einstein
Edited by - konadave on 12/11/2006 07:33:16
