Message Board Spamming

One method of promotion that's mentioned in virtually all web-marketing books is posting to message boards. Done well, this is a highly effective, useful form of promotion. When it's not done correctly, it's just another form of spam.

In reality, the only totally ethical way (in my opinion) to promote your site on a message board is to include the URL in the signature line and/or profile. I think of a signature line or profile as a kind of business card - if someone is interested they can look, but otherwise it's ignored. Any other posting of product information, services, email addresses, autoresponders, URLs, press releases, blatant advertising and any other types of advertising is spam.

Why? With the exclusion of message boards which specifically allow advertising (and these are utterly worthless) the whole concept is to provide people a place to communicate with one another about a topic. It's a way to have conversations. Now imagine if you were standing on the street with a few friends, discussing the latest television show, and someone runs up and screams "buy my product...". Wouldn't you consider that rude? 

Some of the more common methods of spamming a message board are listed below.

Straight spamming - Some spammers just post a message which is a blatant advertisement with little or no disguise at all. Any message board moderator with any intelligence will delete these as fast as possible Advertisements will kill a message board (or newsgroup or any other method of communications) faster than just about anything.

Press Releases - Just another type of advertisement, thinly disguised as news or something important. Just delete these immediately, as they are completely useless to anyone except the poster.

Product recommendations - It's very tempting to allow products to be recommended in message posts. A wise moderator will not allow this to occur. Why not? It's just advertising. Sometimes they are useful to someone, but it's rare. An alternative is to include product recommendations in the FAQ for the board - this way they are reviewed and added by a moderator.

External links - Beware the post that includes a link to an external site. These could be valid or they could be just spam. The best thing to do is simply to disallow external links at all, or at least as much as possible.

Signature lines - Signature lines are those 2 to 5 lines messages that are appended to the bottom of a post. These are intended to be a short "biography" of the poster or, more commonly, to reference the posters external site. My opinion is a small (1 to 3 line) signature is fine (unless the board forbids them entirely. Signature lines should (to be non-spammy) not include blatant advertising or affiliate links.

Degraders - Sometimes on very popular message boards, you will find people who are waiting to pounce on things. Let's say you have lurkers who are really marketers for product A. Someone posts about product B, then these marketers will post to that thread, claiming B is a bad product. This is really just another form of spam. 

Inflating post counts - Many message boards show a count of the number of posts made by each person who contributes something. This is intended to give everyone an idea of the value or trustworthiness of a post or poster.

Clever spammers can make many posts over time, building up not just their post counts, but also their credibility. After the count is sufficiently high (which might take weeks or months, depending upon the spammers patience), posts begin to include product references, autoresponder addresses and web site URLs.

These spammers are rarely caught as they are very patient, extremely clever and, most importantly, very, very trusted. It's only when they get greedy or overanxious and slip up that a quick moderator catches on. Even then, these spammers get so trusted that they might not be banned or even chastised. 

Tag teams - When done well, this spamming technique is extremely difficult to detect. What happens is two or more people begin a topic with the intention of promoting a product or service, or advertising a web site. One member of the team might post a question like "I have this problem...". Other people, including the second member of the team, chime in with suggestions and answers and the conversation goes on for a while. The second member suggests some product or something, and much later the first member says, yeah, he used it and it was great!

How is this defeated? If it happens just occasionally, it probably will never be detected. However, if the posters get sloppy or too bold, then moderators who are on their toes will notice the pattern and ban the posters. 

Talking to themselves - In a variant on the tag team, one person might have conversations with himself. He might post a question, wait for a few people to respond, then answer the question himself, under a different name.

This is one of the easiest professional spammer techniques to catch, as it's generally very obvious what's going on. In addition, good message boards allow moderators to track postings by TCP/IP address. Thus, even though two different IDs are used it's possible to see they are really from the same person. Of course, posting from AOL users (among others) will ALWAYS be on the same TCP/IP address, since AOL uses a common proxy address.

Additional Information