Adapted from Arjun's posting in the PBase forum

Think about why spammers target high visiblity sites with lots of URLs. They want visibility - their bet is, that search engines will index these popular sites, in return indexing the URLs they post, and in return the sites pointed to by the URLs will get popular. The way to defeat is to not show those URLs to search indexers. Delete spams as soon as you encounter them.

SPAM will hit sites that are very popular sooner or later. First it was the emails, then the blogs and now PBase. The more popular, the higher the chance that spammers will target you. PBase is a very highly indexed site (by google and others) and hence will be pretty high (unfortunately) in the target list.

PBase allows the user to choose how to moderate comments (see below). That is a great option. They have also put in place to actively blacklist domains that are part of spam comments. Slug says

Gradually we compiled a list of obvious spam and reworked the code to catch the spam before it goes into a comment or your guestbook.

In addition, PBase system has ensured that HTML code cannot be pasted by people in guestbooks - that avoids attempts to post messages with huge fonts etc.

According to Slug, PBase is actively blacklisting domains suspected of being spam related. However, this is still a short term solution - it is very simple for spammers to change domains - they typically operate with hundreds of forged/captured domains and can keep changing the moment they analyze some are blocked.

You can do a lot. PBase already has the required functionality for us to combat SPAM at your side.

• You can completely disable comments - not a good idea if you like people to leave a comment
• You can allow only PBase subscribers to leave comments - again, maynot be a good idea if your friends who are not PBase members like to browse your galleries
• You can show PBase subscribers comments immediately while guests comments will only show if you decide to (PBase has this option)
• Do not post the entire SPAM comment in the PBASE forums. It does not really help anyone and you are just increasing chances of SPAMmers acheiving what they want - more indexing and visibility

1. Make sure you are logged in
2. Go to www.pbase.com/account
3. Look at the choices in “Who can post comments to your galleries”. Example, select “guests can post”
4. Look at the choices in “Who can post non hidden comments”. Example, select “only comments from PBase subscribers display immediately”
5. Click on Update button

Now what will happen is that when guests leave comments, including spammers, the comments will be accepted, but no one, except you will be able to see it. When you go to comment management page, you will see that these new unapproved comment. If its valid, click on “show”, If its SPAM, click on delete. You have thus stopped SPAM comments from being displayed, therefore stopped it from being picked up by search engines. You have effectively stopped the spammer from achieving their objective as well as ensured that bad comments don't litter the public view of your guestbook.