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Charge $1 Membership Fee to Stop SPAM?

by ghcoleman
12 replies
I'm curious if charging a $1 membership fee would significantly reduce SPAM in my forums?

The forums will contain high value information so would support the charge -- but more curious if it stops spam

Cheers,

Glenn
#charge #fee #membership #spam #stop
  • Profile picture of the author dvduval
    There are many different ways to stop spam I suppose. Preventing new users from posting links, auto-moderating posts from new users, and captcha are some other good ways to do that.
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  • Profile picture of the author Scott Ames
    Originally Posted by ghcoleman View Post

    I'm curious if charging a $1 membership fee would significantly reduce SPAM in my forums?

    The forums will contain high value information so would support the charge -- but more curious if it stops spam

    Cheers,

    Glenn
    I've thought about a similar thing. It has got to stop a large percentage of spam. People that are willing to open their wallet even just for $1.00 are much more interested in the subject that the casual poster that only wants to get links in front of people. I say try it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jesus Perez
    MetaFilter virtually eliminated spam by charging $5 for an account. I paid!
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    • Profile picture of the author Jeff Henshaw
      I'm curious if charging a $1 membership fee would significantly reduce SPAM in my forums?
      You will need to consider several things here.

      Do you charge only new sign ups? In which case the spammers will still be members (as I assume that they are existing members, albeit some will be 'drive by spammers').

      If you introduce the charge to all members and give them a deadline to pay, otherwise they will no longer be able to post, or PM (I would still allow them to sign in and view only), try it on one forum first (you indicate in your post that you have several forums). If then the membership and sign up rate fall significantly, then you can take an informed decision on whether to follow suit with the others.

      I don't know what script that you use, but you could, functionality permitting, only allow posting after a member has posted X number of meaningful posts. This would at least stop the 'drive by' and less persistent spammers.

      There are a number of actions that you can take, but I would in my opinion use charging a fee as a last resort. Whatever method(s) you decide on however, test them one at a time, not on all of your forums and monitor closely the change in both spam and membership levels.

      Just my thoughts,

      Jeff.
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  • Profile picture of the author Johnny Slater
    The first thing I would do is look at the record of the forum software I was using. For example, PHPBB is known for getting spammed to death, as well as several other well known forum scripts.

    I killed the spam from my forum by converting my PHPBB forum over to SMF software. Since I made the switch I haven't gotten even one spam post.

    At the very least turn on the captcha option in the registration process. This will make the spammers have to actually create an account. This won't stop all of it by itself but will cut it way down. Each script usually has one or more plugins or mods that can be added that will cut down on spam as well.
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  • Profile picture of the author Bruce Wedding
    On the copywritingboard.com, I virtually eliminated spam just by blocking Russian and eastern European IP addresses. The rest we kill with aggressive moderation but I'm only talking about a few per month.
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    • Profile picture of the author WPQ
      You'll discourage sign ups HUGELY by doing that. Its not the $1, its the inconvenience and trust issues when your competitiors are just a click away. You need something great (like metafilter) to get away with it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Johnathan
    Originally Posted by ghcoleman View Post

    I'm curious if charging a $1 membership fee would significantly reduce SPAM in my forums?

    The forums will contain high value information so would support the charge -- but more curious if it stops spam

    Cheers,

    Glenn
    Hi Glenn,

    Yes, charging a membership fee does remove spam (from 'legit' posters that periodically advertise their services, which is what I am assuming you are referring to). If you are talking about spam (in general), then you need to add a captcha and/or a few other methods to verify it is a 'real' user as opposed to a bot.

    Johnathan
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  • Profile picture of the author upscholar200
    The metafilter is a better option in stopping spam from your forums along with the captcha. The $1 fee would just end up chasing away otherwise useful members
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  • Profile picture of the author wan_14my
    Or maybe you can charge new member the $1 and moderate the old members posts to find out which accounts are used for spam. Then, delete that accounts.

    Just my $0.02
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  • Profile picture of the author JaredKels
    I would defintely pay 1 dollar to stop spam.
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