My forum is still very small, there's only a handful of people that post regularly, but we do get a TON of spam. It's spam heaven there and I have to be on top of it all the time to keep it off the forums.

I've been thinking of asking one of the members to be a Mod, to help keep the spam out and also to promote converstation on the boards, since we still really need people (that would be ME) to post daily starter topics to get any convo at all.

However, it feels kinds strange to hire someone when the board isn't active enough to really warrent it. For spam yes, for moding the boards...not yet.

What would you do? Keep on killing the spam yourself untill you get more active, or just hire a mod now and hope it works out?
I already know which person I'd ask, I'm just not sure now is the right time.

Thoughts?

__________________
Pet Forums
Dog Training Information
Supernatural Forums - Discuss the show!

Well you need some tricks to make PhpBB less vulnerable. There's a hack called humanizer. You need to set the image validation in the registration page and set email validation to user (that forces the new user to click an activation link in the email they get). I kinda reduced the spam a lot with these tricks

__________________

i'd agree with getting a validation email set up for the forum. From my experience this deters a large proportion of them as they tend to use fake emails on the registration.

Another idea may be to limit the amount of boards new members can post on for a trial period of say
1 week or even have it based on posts.

So allow newly registered users into some boards but restrict off others to 'regular members' or 'established members' or whatever rank title you decide.