Fake User Accounts and Spam Profiles -- Tips and Advice from Google

A member of Google's Search Quality team addresses spammer and fake profiles as well as Black Hat SEO techniques, and what you can do about it: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Spam2.0: Fake user accounts and spam profiles

 

Damn Google Webmaster blog's down.

Any way, I usually keep these accounts cleaned off my forums. anything thats a spammer just gets deleted 100% from the system

 

The article pointed out that you can't always tell which are spam accounts right away; spammers sometimes use realistic names and data and quietly post their links on their profile page.

 

This reminds me of my PM spammer I had a few months ago. The guy joined up and would spam members using PMs. I found out when they PMed my test accounts and friends accounts.

 

I don't even have my forums up and running as such, but am having problems with people joining who seem to have no interest other than selling porn or some such. I keep deleting their accounts, they come back, at this point I am thinking having a forum is a bad idea all round. How can you control who can join etc?

 

What forum software are you using?

 

Looks like phpbb from the postbit.