Fortunately, long-time friend of the site Patrick O’Keefe recently released a book targeted at helping forum and community administrators run their sites. The book, entitled “Managing Online Forums“, is a broad guide to running a Web-based community.

It is a book that all forum administrators, especially new ones, should look at picking up. Not only can the advice in this book help you grow your community, but it can also help keep your site on the right side of the law and a good neighbor on the Web.

A Practical Guide

Perhaps, the best way to describe O’Keefe’s book is “down to earth”. The book is not merely content on providing the information forum admins needs to do their jobs, but to provide real-world examples.

Throughout the book there are call outs and sample documents for readers to look at and mirror on their own sites. For example, chapter three, which discusses setting up forum guidelines, not only details the requirements for a good set of forum rules, but provides several examples of good guidelines, including some used on the author’s actual forums.

Likewise, chapter six, which discusses how to handle problem users, is laden with actual stories of forum participants gone wild, almost all of which are pulled from the author’s actual experience as a forum administrator.

But while the examples and hand-holdiong may help gear the book toward novice admins, a group for which there is precious little help, there is enough detailed information to make it useful for veterans. Specifically, the later chapters about adding new features to the forum and making money will likely have strong appeal to forum veterans and those already running sizable communities.

Still, the majority of the book is definitely geared toward inexperienced admins and works to help them learn the lessons in print that most have to learn the hard way.

Why This Book Is Important

As someone who has worked with dozens of community and forum admins, I know well how “over their heads” many admins get. This is especially true when it comes to legal matters, such as copyright infirngement, trademark issues and privacy.

With forum software, such as phpBB, often being as easy to install as one click and free community sites such as Yuku making it easy to set up and run your community with no cost, the decision to set up a community is often an impulse one made without consideration of the practical requirements.

This lack of administrator preparedness is big part of why forums are being used as spam blogs and communities are often some of the most difficult sites to get infringing works removed from.

An administrator that is unprepared to handle the realities of running a community does a disservice not only to their members, but to the rest of the Web. Fortunately, this book not only makes it easy to learn what you need, but provides the tools to execute an effective strategy.

If you are setting up a forum or even just thinking about it, this is information that you can not afford to be without.

Conclusions

If I were going to lob a complaint at this book it would be that its audience focus was too narrow. Though bloggers and other Webmasters may get some out of the book, it is clear that the vast majority of the content is geared at forum admins and, more specifically, novice admins.

Still, this is an important group to target. Not only do they need the most help establishing and growing a healthy forum, but also with dealing with the inevitable headaches that come with it. Those who have been “behind the curtain” of large forums are a fairly small group and, overall, are reluctant to share their information.

On that note, if you do not purchase a copy of the book, you can visit the book’s Web site and download the relevant templates, including user guidelines, staff member guidelines and contact templates (for when a user violates a rule).

The point is though, no matter where you get it from, this is information every forum admin needs to know. The greatest asset this book has is combining the information into one resource.

However, for me, that is reason enough for it to have a place on my shelf.

However, forum spam has typically shared the most in common with blog comment spam. A few junk links mixed with some garbled text in a bid to create a search engine pump. Although such spam has been the bane of forum admins, it has been relatively easy to control and has raised few issues for content creators.

But a new twist on forum spam changes that game. Spammers have begun to use forums much like spam blogs, using them as a tool for posting scraped content, rather than just garbage links.

This brings a whole new series of challenges to both forum admins and copyright holders as they both seek to keep the Web clean of spam content and plagiarized works.

Why Forums

Spammers are naturally drawn to forums for a lot of reasons. Consider the following:

1. Open Registration: Anyone can set up an account at most forums and the process of doing so can be easily automated at many locations since most forums use one of a handful forum applications, many of which have weak signup protections.


2. High Trust: Forums generally have a high level of trust with search engines and are very search-engine friendly in most cases. Many forums carry a high PageRank and can provide an excellent platform for spammers to build search engine ranking.


3. NoFollow: Unlike blog comments, which are almost always “nofollowed”, the linking policy for each forum is different. Many, however, do not nofollow links contained in the post itself.
   
4. Overworked Admins: If spam is able to get through the automated protections, it may be quite some time before an admin or a moderator is able to remove it. Active forums have many times more posts than most blogs have comments and most forum admins do not receive email alerts for every new post.


5. Low-Hanging Fruit: In addition to active and trusted forums, there are countless inactive ones that still have a Web presence. The forum admins may never remove spam on those, making them ripe targets for spammers, despite the lack of trust and updates.

However, these reasons for targeting forums are well-known and have been around for some time. Forum admins took an interest in stopping spam well before most bloggers did and have tools in place to try and block it.

But while many of those protections have been cracked, most well-maintained forums are relatively free from spam, the same as most well-maintained blogs.

But a new wave of spam may be changing that and very soon.

Forum Spam Redux

As is typical with the games of cat and mouse, spammers have escalated their attacks on forums and are working harder to blend in with legitimate users.

One of the techniques they are using is the scraping, or mere hand-copying, of articles and posting them to related forums. However, the use of the work is, for the most part, unattributed and often times the links contained within the article are altered to point to the spam sites.

Other times, spammers simply create profiles, post seemingly legitimate but otherwise junk content, usually by copying other sources, and bury the spam links in their user information.

Both of these techniques closely mirror the activities of legitimate users and, since many forums take a lenient attitude toward copyright infringement by itself, forum admins are often slow to take action against such spammers as they rarely spot them.

It is not uncommon to see cases where a spammer has posted a scraped article, loaded it with junk links, and has received replies from regular members, further validating the post.

Content creators, however, suffer from this. While they might not be opposed to the copying and reposting of their work on the forum, the unattributed use practically guarantees that, in many cases, the forum will rank higher in the search engines and their own site will suffer.

The forum itself will also suffer, potentially having to face copyright complaints from angry Webmasters and dealing with potential Google spam blocks that could make it harder for them to be ranked in the long term.

It is in the best interest of forum admins and content creators alike that these spammers be thwarted.

What Forum Admins Can Do

Forum admins already have their hands full and this new spam attack is not going to make things any easier. However, there are some things that they can do to help not only themselves, but their community and content creators.

1. Be Available: A good general rule for forum admins is to be available for anyone who visits your forum to make complaints, point out spam or otherwise raise issues. This means having an email address on the public-facing portion of your site so non-members can contact you as easily as your users.


2. Don’t Tolerate Copyright Infringement: Don’t wait for others to file copyright infringement complaints. If a users republishes an article or is clearly copying and posting whole works in posts, truncate the post and link to the source. Make this part of your policy. Forums rely on original content and good discussions, wholesale copying is not necessary for that.


3. Investigate Questionable Users: If a user does infringe, especially if they do so more than once, take a closer look at them including their profile links. Make sure they are not trying to spam the forum discreetly.


4. Nofollow Links: If your software has the ability to nofollow links in posts, it is likely a good idea to do so, especially with new users or users that have not earned a great deal of trust.


5. Update Spam Protection: Keep on top of your regular spam protection tools and keep your countermeasures up to date. Like most of these items, it is a good idea in general but is especially important as spammers continue to crack CAPTCHAs and other torture tests.

In short, these are good steps that all forum admins should take, regardless of whether they are currently spam targets or not. Though the problem seems to be currently isolated to technology forums (video games, computers, cell phones, etc.), some gambling forums and adult communities, it is only a matter of time before it spreads.

That is, if it hasn’t already.

Conclusions

In the end, this is just another escalation in the war between administrators and spammers, but this escalation has some potentially drastic consequences for bloggers, journalists and other content creators.

It is important that this trend be watched closely to see if it continues or if it fizzles out and goes nowhere.

However, given the nature of spammers to constantly try different techniques, it seems unlikely that they will retreat from a method if it has been shown to have any success.

Rather, they will just add on other techniques and further expand their operations.