The American Fertility Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing infertility whenever possible and to helping people build families of choice, particularly when faced with infertility.
The organization had a bulletin board which had become a magnet for spammers and host to foul language and pornographic discussion which went against their professional ethos and discouraged new genuine posters from joining or stopping existing ones from sticking around. They wanted Koves to clean up the forum and make it a friendlier and more useful place to discuss fertility matters.
Websitehttp://www.TheAFA.org
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The Challenges As soon as we saw the setup of their PHP bulletin board, we knew what the problem was. The webmasters had not deployed anti-spam security measures and kept their bulletin board application up to date, which meant that bots could easily create accounts to automatically spam the forums. Although successful forums need to be human moderated, they can help keep inappropriate language at bay by the use of filters and banning of offenders. |
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The Solution First of all, we made sure that the bulletin board was using the latest version, which utilized enhanced security to stop bots from automatically setting up accounts. Then we developed a range of custom security measures and filters to prevent foul language being used and to check for spamming. To assist in rebuilding the site’s credibility and promote a new AFA sponsored event, we donated an AdWords PPC campaign to inform people looking for useful content that the forum was now a safe and worthwhile place to get and give advice. |
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The Results Bot activity and pornographic content was reduced by a massive 99%, the remainder being within the scope of authorized moderators to deal with. Over time, the 1% who remained are likely to tire of having their efforts to subvert the forum thwarted and give up. |
