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[Matt]

A few times a day, some bad spammer gets through our spam handling on the forum and makes a post selling viagra, imitation watches, cigarettes, etc.  Normally the text doesn't make any sense -- they're just trying to scatter links to improve their Google rating.

We delete the account and posts when we see it.

But I got thinking, would Google understand if we instead kept the posts, moved them to their own board, and put "sucks" in the name of every link?

For example, they would post:
Buy from badspammer.

We would change it to:
Buy from badspammer sucks.

Would negative words in the link text get associated with the link?  It'd be satisfying to do, even if it didn't help.

[MrC]

You'll just tarnish your own site and reputation.  Best to just delete and consider it a cost of doing business.

[marko]

I agree with MrC.

[InflatableMouse]

Spammers are bots, always as far as I'm aware. If you want to stop spam you need to prevent them from being able to sign up automatically. I know from experience that most of the traditional captcha's don't work very well. Real people will get more trouble signing up and these bots seem to have little trouble with them at all. Most people hate the traditional captcha's because they're too hard so I wouldn't opt for this.

There are captcha's that are easier though. 4 small pictures that you need to arrange (like a simple puzzle), or a picture you need to match (drag eggs to a basket). I think these are called visual captcha's. They are really easy but because it involves a randomness and dragging something with the mouse, I don't think bots are able to get past them (yet).

Also what seems to help is one or two random questions from a database that need to be answered during the signup process. These questions would be simple for anyone but should not easily be answered by a bot based on dictionary words etc.

Either way, user signup process will get a little bit more difficult and there will always be users bailing out because it doesn't work for them.

Or, you could block the entire ip range of the asian continent  .

Or, accept it as part of doing business as suggested by MrC. I think this is only a viable option if the amount of spam is low enough.

[kstuart]

It would cause more work, but the fix is to require moderation of people's posts until they post something about MediaCenter.   I don't know if SMF supports this.

I moderate a group on Yahoo!Groups and they support that feature and it works fine.

The first post by a new member will either be "Hi I have a question about ___ " or else " Buy our great product at www.spammersite dot com ".  If the former, I remove moderation, if the latter, I ban the member.

Works fine, but it requires a little extra work...

[KingSparta]

don't buy Viagra from spammers, dang get it from your doctor.

most of them from spammers are nothing more than cellulose anyway, per the FDA.

[InflatableMouse]

The reason for their posts is not so much to lure you into clicking their links and buy something, although I'm sure they'd be grateful. Not many people in their right mind would care to even read their crap because most of the time, it doesn't even make sense. Those few clicks from those who are bored enough or can't resist the urge, aren't enough to go through all the trouble they take.

The real reason is that if their keywords and URL's are found across many different sites they rise up in search engine ranks for those keywords. If they are higher up in the ranks, they show up higher in search results and ultimately, they get much more pagehits than they would from you or me clicking a link in a forum post.