Spam prevention for your dating site

All dating and social sites are victims of new annoying type of spam. Unlike the e-mail spam here the messages are sent by actual people and are not automated. The senders are almost always from Nigeria or Senegal and they always find a way to register to your site and send messages like this one:

Goodday dearest i so much like your profile, I must say that am just new at internet dating, been single and friendly in nature. My name is anna,am 24 years old . please i will love it most if we get more acquanted with eachother because am seeking for a long term friendly affair build on a concrete foundation with a family oriented man of your kind who knows what it means to love and be loved (anna_77utazi/@/ya/hoo/dot/co/dot/uk ) (*** ) please contact me at the below e mail address a n n a _ 7 7 u t a z i at y a h o o . c o . u k Thanks and take care, hopping to read from you soonest, best regards anna.

The above example is an actual message caught by the AspNetDating spam detection system on our live demo site. There are several ways to protect from such messages:

1. Block IPs from Senegal and Nigeria. 99.9% of the registrations from those countries is for spamming purposes.
2. Prevent automatic registrations with CAPTCHA or other anti-bot measures.
3. Manually approve the first few messages for each user. This is by far the most effective method. Spammers will always start spamming right away so you can catch them from the first message. If the first 3 or so messages are fine then the user is most certainly not a spammer.
4. Allow users to report spam. Your users are the best spam detectors.
5. Catch users with multiple repeated similar messages. In most cases a spam account sends multiple messages with the same or similar content. It is a good idea to put on hold those users until you verify them.

With the industry leading dating and community software AspNetDating you can use some or all of the above methods to fight spam.