Free forum is the most practical way of starting an online business because it is affordable. You can sign up for a free forum with www.makeforum.org. But, your problems begin after you have your forum in place. The most annoying problem is caused by spammers. Spammers are the parasites that eat into your business considering the time and effort you have to waste on dealing with them. Because spamming is done in volume, robots usually do the spamming. These spam robots, or simply bots attack your free forum so that they can register users to post spam on their accounts. The spam has links pointing to the person's website. Their purpose is to make a high link count in order to rank high in the search engines.

Forums like e-mail are the most vulnerable as they get a lot of spam. The administrators of websites are caught up with this problem. They spend hours trying to devise news ways of tackling spam. You need to have the right security to keep bots away otherwise you will be caught unawares and get hit by a ton of spam.

Often people make the mistake of setting more options in their free forums not realising that they are actually inviting spam inadvertently. So, it is best to be wary of these options in the first place. Then, make sure to install some small security measures to safeguard against spammers. The easiest way to shove spam out of the way is to make people register before they post on a forum. This will solve the problem to a large extent.

But how do you keep the robots away? Once they discover your site, the spam postings will begin in bulk. A way to control this and keep robots away from your forum is to require people who register to identify numbers and letters from a graphic during the registration process. A robot, of course, cannot fill out a form in such a manner and won't be able to create any fake registrations.

Sometimes this doesn't work though, simply because human spammers will sign up and send out the spam that way. Oftentimes people are hired in third world countries for very low wages to send out a multitude of spam. So what do you do in this situation? One way to control this is to have the administrator approve every registration that goes through. You will see once you do this, that you'll get 30 to 40 attempted registrations each day that are from spammers.

Sometimes even robots can find the right answers when spammers make out the displayed graphic during the registration process. There is a way to beat them in their game by installing a modification that will ask the bot certain questions that only a human can read, understand, and answer. Just keep changing the questions and answers, and robots won't be able to keep pace with you.

All you need to know is whether the registration is a human or a robot. You can get a confirmation about this through their e-mail address. This is the simplest way to know whether the registrant is real person or a robot.