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 perpetually struggling to prevent spam because they receive a lot of spam. The administrators of websites are constantly engaged with finding ways and means to keep spams out of the way. The robots do the spamming in volumes, and the only way to keep the bots away is to have the right security in your forum otherwise you will be flooded with a lot 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 register them? It is not difficult at all. You ask people to identify numbers and letters from a graphic during the registration process. This is enough to distinguish between a human and a robot, because a robot cannot fill out a form in such a manner. So the question of creating fake registrations will not arise.

The problem becomes more complicated when actual humans start sending spam in bulk. These human spammers are hired in third world countries at cheap rates to send out a multitude of spam. In such cases, you will have to ask every registration to get approved by the administrator. You will be surprised to find out that at an average you get 30 to 40 attempted registrations each day that are from spammers.

Sometimes spammers can figure out what graphic is displayed during the registration process and the robot can actually answer the question with the right answer. A clever way some forum administrators have gotten around this is to install a modification that will ask the bot certain questions that only a human can read, comprehend, and answer. Because you can change the questions and answers, it can be different for each forum and robots won't be able to catch up to you.

Another simple method is to force new registrations to confirm that they are an actual person through their e-mail address. You simply send everyone an automatic message that forces them to click a link through the e-mail message to confirm. This is a great way to know that someone is a real registrant.