Spamming can ruin the credibility of a website, especially when it’s a blog or a forum. If you are a site administrator, here are some measures that will make your site spam-free.

If you are still in the beginning stages, then prevention is always better than cure. Check which providers offer anti-spam tools, that let you control which information you want to be posted on your site. The best and most secure providers often give tools that can enable you to:

Have good moderator options As an administrator, you can’t do all the work alone. At one point, you will have to get a staff of moderators who will help you with monitoring posting and membership issues. Sites that allow moderators some control (whichever you give them) over some admin tools would be great for this.

Manually activate all membership sign-ups Manual activation of memberships is always the best choice. This way you can personally check the profile of a registrant if he is genuine or not.

Disable certain members from posting These spammers are intelligent beings. They may pass your manual activation criteria but they turn out to be creeps in the end. Once you’ve spotted one or two occurrences, you can always enforce forum rules – from suspension to kicking a member out.

Block email and ISP addresses This is great if you have an existing list of e-mail addresses and ISP addresses of known (and maybe even popular) spammers. You can simply fill in the area in the control panel of these undesirable addresses and they are automatically banned.

Disable groups of email addresses by recognizing patterns. Same as the one above. You can type in key words or phrases and posts or messages that contain those words will be automatically blocked.

Of course, not everything is fool proof. These tools can only be handy if you, as an administrator or moderator, are vigilant in your anti-spam advocacy. Good luck!