Classifieds and Spammers

It seems lately a lot of classifieds sites have been getting hit with spam. For a classified site owner spam can be either someone placing false listings or someone emailing people that have added listings on your site. In the post I am going to talk about email spam instead of fake listings.

First off 68 Classifieds includes several spam prevention measures to help you combat spam. These are captcha, user registration, and private messages. Each of these options have their own positives and negatives and there is probably not one best way for every site.

Captcha systems are more of a deterrent than anything. A real human can get the captcha correct and still send spam. Although most of the time they use bots so they can send hundreds or thousands of messages very quickly. We include by default a captcha system named FreeCap. This system is very basic and because of this I also created a reCaptcha module. The reCaptcha system is supposed to be one of the most secure captcha systems out.

The user registration system in 68 Classifieds is another possible solution. You can force visitors to register on your site and only allow people that have registered to actually contact the listing owners. By going this route you can force email validation and have more details about the person trying to contact someone. For example when someone joins their ip address is logged in their account.

Finally is the private message system. This requires people to be registered users and the emails that are sent just tell the ad owner that they have a new private message. Then they read on your site and can flag it as spam. This has the same drawbacks as allowing only registered users to contact folks. But the benefits are it allows you to have a record everything sent and keeps people coming back to your site to read and reply to the message.

As you can see we offer several ways for you to combat spam and I normally recommend using a captcha system first. If you are still getting spam then go to one of the other methods. Like I mentioned no method is 100% foil proof but you can put measures in place to help.