Dealing with spammers

Why was I tempted to click the exclamation mark on the OP as soon as I read about it?

I think, like 2 months ago, on the forum's front page there were almost 2500 total members. Now its 2283. Is it possible all that were spammers? I'm not sure about numbers, but I remember it jumping up and down like crazy, moderators must've had hard time deleting accounts.

I don't think they were all spam accounts, I think the database was pruned.

Yes, I pruned a lot of accounts signed up by spambots - there were literally hundreds, it was a big problem until we changed the captcha.

A good deal of those were the silent spammer types, the kind that just sit there with links in their profiles. I guess the people that made those bots don't realize that search engine spiders can't crawl phpBB profiles. Well, at least this board has it set up that way.

http://www.scirra.com

Just a test ^

Hurm just had a quick look, no Robots.txt is specified so search engines will crawl the profiles afaik. Also, hyperlinks in the profile, and hyperlinks posted in this forum do not have the rel="nofollow" specified, so any links posted in these forums will be sucking pagerank from Scirra.

This will all be fixed on the new website.

You have to be logged in to see profiles AFAIK, so search engine bots won't see them anyway.

Just a test ^

Hurm just had a quick look, no Robots.txt is specified so search engines will crawl the profiles afaik. Also, hyperlinks in the profile, and hyperlinks posted in this forum do not have the rel="nofollow" specified, so any links posted in these forums will be sucking pagerank from Scirra.

This will all be fixed on the new website.

Not sure if specifying that links should open a new tab would have much effect on crawlers, but it might help with your own page rank.

Opening in new window wont have any effect afaik, but rel="nofollow" is designed specifically for that purpose, Search engines will ignore those links.

No, they won't ignore those links, they'll still crawl them. They'll just not credit any juice of origin site to linked side. Basically, Scirra.com won't be associated with shoes, panties or whatever crops up.

Yeah, you're correct it still crawls them from what I've just read. But the main purpose is to stop losing page rank to them and being associated with them. At the moment links on this forum are naked and are damaging Scirra's SEO, but new website fixes this.

It seems to me that there are more bots(not spambots) lately. Is it because the forum is slowly getting bigger? I remember only one Google bot for a long time, now there are always 5+ bots logged.

Figure that is because everyone wants a slice of the cake Google is having.

50% of spammers are human's. Now what?