Setting up your own discussion forum is really easy these days when you can just select the forum software you want to use in your web hosting control panel and a few clicks later your own forum has been setup ready to use. It’s fun to have your own forum where you can discuss you products and services with your customers, but also spammers love your discussion forum especially if you abandon your forum.
So if you setup a forum on your own domain name and later abandon or forget to check your forum for spam you will soon have a forum with thousands of users and posts. This may sound good, but un-moderated forums attract spammers like honey attracts bees 🙁 since they get a fully legitimate domain name (yours) to use for their shady activities.
Just by doing a simple search I found thousands of abandoned forums full of spam posts, and the worst part is that the owners of these domain names most likely don’t know that their sites are used for spam.
This is one of the forums I found during my research:
As you can see the forum is full of spam full of links helping spammers to promote drugs, porn and other nasty stuff. The owner of this forum is a fully legitimate company and they don’t know that they help spammers in their shady activities.
Some of the posts in this forum contains links to other abandoned forums to help these forums to build page rank. May sound nice, but it isn’t. The higher page rank this abandoned forum gets the worse the problem will get since the spammers will just abuse this forum even more. Not only will these activities give the site owner badwill, they will also have to pay for the disk space and bandwidth used by the spammers.
It’s not enough here since soon enough it’s not just the regular spam in this kind of forums, but also child porn 🙁 . And then it’s not just badwill for the site owner, it’s also a crime. In best case your site is just shut down and you lose all your website backups and customers, but in worst case you could also get a visit from the nice dudes at FBI.
So if you have tried some forum or blog software on your site but abandoned it, you should make sure you un-install it before you’re used as a tool in the spammers activities.
