If you own a directory using one of the off the shelf scripts you might notice that there’s a number of short comings which may make some of your editing tasks a bit more challenging.
Some will permit you to ban certain words from the titles, URLs or descriptions and automatically delete those submissions or there are mods that you can add to the back-end that will do the same.
This saves quite a bit of time as you don’t have to delete the undesirable submissions for pharmacy products, adult entertainment or other sites you choose not to list.
Most of the scripts don’t handle foreign languages very well and you can get inundated with spam from certain European block countries. Another short coming of the majority of these scripts is that they allow automated submissions which by-pass the captcha and write to the data-base.
You may or may not receive any notification of a submission this way and you’ll generally find it when you log in to your admin panel.
The more popular your web directory becomes, the more spam you’ll have to endure as it’s just the nature of the beast. Attempts to gain access to your back end may increase as well.
But there are a few things that you can do to reduce the amount of spam you have to deal with:
- Make sure that there’s a filter to ban certain words from the titles, URLs and descriptions.
- If not, find a third party mod that will allow you to eliminate these types of submissions automatically.
- Block direct requests for your submission page.
- Restrict access to your admin panel to your own IP
- Block repeat offenders’ IPs via .htaccess
These are just a few simple suggestions that can help to make the editing task a little easier. Got any tips to share? Feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to update the list.
Happy editing!