Internet forums attract plenty of users who want to discuss any number of topics. Their popularity has never waned, from the days of the earliest bulletin boards. It's testimony of peoples willingness to communicate their thought, ideas and feelings on a huge range of topics.

I use several forum sites worldwide, some like boards.org.uk and boards.ie are generalised with many forum categories, one site I use is specifically dedicated to book-lovers, another for writers, I also frequent tenpin bowling forums, Audio visual forums and a Call of Duty 4 PS3 clan forum.

One thing most forum sites have in common is that they are targets for viral marketing and shills. Some viral marketing is very direct, an employee from the marketing department of a company will start a new thread to say how great their product is.

Some viral marketing is not so direct. Sometimes employees of marketing departments or marketing agencies register accounts and pretend to be a normal user. They search forums for threads mentioning a product and then proceed to say "Oh yes, I bought one of those and I find it really useful/enjoyable. It was cheaper/better quality than [competitor product]. These people are known as shills* and there are huge numbers of them out there.

Shills are also used to bolster poor reviews of an article. Sometimes people who have bought a product such as a new computer game or TV might write on a fourm to say that they are disappointed and found the product to be inferior. Others may post to say the same. In this case the shill will counteract these negative product 'reviews' with a glowing tribute to the product, in an effort to convince people that the product is actually better than the initial reviews said. If you look at certain online stores you will see that they allow customer reviews of a product. Quite often you will see a product that receives 2/5 for most reviews but suddenly a review giving 5/5 will appear.

So shills are easy to spot then, right? The truth is some shills are extremely obvious, their posts read like something that came straight from a salesmans brochure, the grammar and spelling are perfect, phrases such as "bringing forward a new era in entertainment" are used. These guys can be spotted and banned easily. Some shills are stupid enough to register the same username across every site they register at, and post about the same product. A quick search throws these guys up quickly enough.

Others are a bit more clever, they introduce grammar mistakes or use txtspk (text speak) to appear like an ordinary punter posting a comment e.g. "Yeah, I bought dat TV 2 n it's cool. Has all the features I want n more!", instead of "This TV provides crystal clear sound and a picture that makes use of revolutionary technology to enhance the viewing experience". :D

On boards.org.uk we've had 'em all, the lazy obvious shill and the sneaky shill. Some guys take it even further. They register one account and ask a benign question such as "Where can I hire a car in [placename]?". A few days later they register another account and reply to the question with the name and website of the business they wish to pimp. Dishonesty never pays! IP matching quickly finds these people!

More recntly on boards.org.uk we had a guy make about 5 posts in a day, very generic...apart from one that linked to the forums of an official British tourism website. I thought that it was a bit suspicious but said I'd wait a bit to see what kicked off. Over on the Moderators forum BuffyBot started a thread, saying this user was "One to watch". Great minds think alike...but fools seldo...nevermind :D

Anyway, I decided we'd let it go for a day or two and if the user came back to contribute more to the site, we'd simply remove the link for now and reinstate it later if he was a legitimate user of the site. Then, two days later a new user registers...his first port of call is the same suspicious post we saw earlier in the week. He then proceeds to post with another link to the same forum. Shenanigans ahoy! IP matching reveals nothing, they are either not the same person or have a proxy or dynamic IP address. However, that was enough, the thread was closed and links removed and the users banned.

So what exactly is the problem with shills and viral marketing? Well firstly, people visit forums to ask other regular users questions about products and services. They want real unbiased advice about such things, not some shill extolling the virtues of a crap product or service. If we allowed shills free reign to post on forums, then we could never believe anything we read and the usefulness and reliability of Bulletin Boards would fail. We can't have that.

Just in case any marketeers are reading this (doubtful, don't think anyone reads this :D)and think that they should be allowed defend bad reviews. We are careful about that too. A while ago we quietly removed a post written by a new user who appeared to have signed up just to have a go at a certain company and the service they provide. A biased negative review can be damaging, we know that. If we know the user to be fair and honest we allow reviews and comments to stay but if someone signs up just to rubbish the name of a company they are either very disgruntled...or possibly a competitor shill!

This is why shills and viral marketing on forums are bad. Stamp out shills, keep the banhammers at the ready!

*Shill is actually a term first employed by confidence tricksters, where the shill is the person who reassures the victim that the con trick is legitamite by appearing to buy into the trick first, before anyone else, thus eliminating doubt from the victims mind. This then encourages others to buy into the trick. Basically it exploits the sheep mentality!