Can anyone help me with SPAM on my free dating site. They keep sending the 'dearly beloved....i have $10,00000 for you my friend....letters to my members. The idiots are stupid enough to put GHANA or NIGERIA as their location (no offense to anyone from there),so makes my life a bit easier to track them but, they keep coming back.

I have a verification to register but after that there is no system in place to stop it. The auto 'you have mail' message gets sent out but if i delete a spammers profile after the event my users login to find no mail. They now complain the site is faulty.

I have looked into various options like banning IP's/countries etc or another verification to send a message but i think they are doing it by hand anyway. A bad words filter or spam detection software is another option but heard they are not 100% reliable. My web developer has basically washed their hands of it now he has my money so i am a bit stumped! Any advice? Where do you think i should spend my money?

I don't know what your site is programmed in, but you can add a filter to flag messages.

If it is a message board, it is most likely in PHP. The coding for that is easy.

Example, anything with the word "Nigeria" will pull up a flag. You can immediately identify the user. You can also program it to prevent the post/message from being delivered until you approve it, thereby helping to avoid scams.

If I were a dating site, I would have the computer moniter all private messages. Anything with the words "Wire Transfer" or "Nigeria" would get flagged, so you can observe if there is an attempt at illicit activity.

Marc Lesnick
Webmaster
Internet Dating Conference
Social Networking Conference

Thanks for the reply.
My problem is my developer is not really interested in my project anymore and when i request a quote for adding the filter they reply with a ridiculous price.
Can someone answer me this:-

Each of my members has an internal email system so they can message each other, (its not a message board), its private and i do not approve any messages unless spam is reported.

Spammers have created profiles and send messages individually to each member,(asking for contact details and bank account details etc), i have asked for a filter to be added that will pick up on bad words, that i can create in my CMS, and intercept them so i can deal with them or send on.

I dont have much coding knowledge. How difficult would this be to do this? I am being quoted £465. Thats about $912! Am i being ripped off???

Thanks again but i think just by adding a filter for a $ symbol would catch most of them. What i really want to know is am i being ripped off for adding it (nearly $1000). Is it really a few lines of code? Also if i wanted to get ftp access and invite someone else, to develop the site with me, could they read and understand what my original developer had coded?

Before you hire someone, you need to know what the site is programmed in. Is it PHP (look at the extension on the end of the webpage "blah-blah.com/blah-blah.PHP" means it was programmed in PHP).

It would be also good to know if a free application was used.

Example:

http://www.phorum.org
http://www.simplemachines.net
http://www.phpbb.com

Are all free message boards. All have anti spam modifications (known as 'MODS') that you can insert to do just what you want.

Marc Lesnick
Conference Organizer
Online Dating Convention
Social Networking Event