How spam can ruin a site, and a movement.
Last May A friend had a problem with Child Protective Services. Come to find out many people have problems with them for no fault of their own. We decided to start a forum and hopefully a movement for grandparents of Georgia and maybe the nation.
In August we started a forum here and had problems immediately. The on site avatars do not work, still don't. Our new members, and ourselves, could not post links to important information or even an email address to contact us, for 5 days and 5 posts. We wanted a forum without ads, so I emailed Bizhat for an ad free forum (total 6 emails) and still have not heard back from them.
Just as our momentum was building and our site growing, the profile spam started coming in. This was about the time we had grandparents and state agency personnel looking at the site. It really looks good for a site dealing with children's issues and trying to reform a state agency to have links to pornography, drugs and gambling on it.
Things got so out of hand I was spending my on line time deleting profiles and not on the issue that I started the forum to deal with. I finally banned all email addresses to stop the spam, but no one else can join my forum.
Now, about 5 months later, our forum is all but dead and our momentum is gone. We're tired of dealing with the spam and trying to keep pornography, drugs, gambling and links to sites with viruses off of the forum. What was once a cause with energy and a momentum is almost dead.
I found a hosting company to move my personal sites to that provides these discussion forums as a part of their package. I have set up 3 of them and for the past 2 months have gotten no spam at all on them. The problem is that I can find no one who can tell me how to move the posts that I have on the board here at Bizhat.
My advice, If you possibly can, move to another forum site now before you invest your time and energy into something that cannot be moved, and will likely become more of a pain in the ass than anything else. Check it out thoroughly to see how they deal with spam and other issues that will concern your needs.
There are forums that do not have these problems.
