Well, one thing that is definitely true is that spammers will always be around. They even went and spammed my long lost forum which had hardly any visitors except myself. I guess when they spot such a forum in this condition, they think that since no one is maintaining it, it should be a pretty good target for spamming. And they didn’t spam like one topic or post, they did like 20-25 posts in all. I believe that there were about 3 different spammers, but all were “selling” the same thing - SMS Ads and they were from India. Has India became the spam capital of the world already? In the past, it was Eastern Europe where most spammers came from. Perhaps the outsourcing of spam has shifted from Eastern Europe to India now.

I wonder why did they spam forums that were long dead and even if they don’t know it was long dead, a look at the lack of replies in the forums would be an easy indication. My forum didn’t even have any real activity for months. One would think that they were doing it for SEO purposes but when I looked at the post, I realized that that is not the case. The URLs were just URLs, without any anchor text at all. Either the spammer is not aiming for Search Engine rankings or he/she is just a beginner. It is not ideal to spam a long dead forum and hoping that you will get visitors from those links.

I guess there is no way to truly block or to stop spammers from coming in. The only thing I could do is to block open proxy access from the webhost’s control panel (that’s IP deny manager in Cpanel) using the IP addresses. Open Proxies usually have a fixed IP address which can be easily discovered but the problem is that there are a huge number of proxy servers out there on the Internet. For every one you add to your IP list, perhaps another 5 takes it’s place. Other than that, I have used Captcha to prevent automated bot registrations which don’t seem to be effective anymore. In the past, it was quite effective. The number of spammers that registered were far and few between and these were usually “human spammers” and not bots. I guess for those webmasters with a very active forum, they will be hardpressed to find a solution to the spamming problem. The best way would be to have a number of moderators who will help to maintain the individual subforums and clear out spam as and when they appear. One cannot do it alone. I have tried and it fails badly.