It may just be me but?????

Thanks  Tanya for your patience & help in this matter, please let us know if there is anything we can do to help in the future. Let's keep on keeping on.

Spam is still up there from yesterday and this morning.

As to why you can't simply ban the spammers, they are using automated scripts to create new accounts on new ip addresses. Simply put, there is no way to ban them. You just have to delete their posts. 

It didn't happen in the old forum because that message board software had been defunct for several years. Spammers aren't going to code a script for a one-off forum.

The new site performs much better and it utilizes modern secure technology. 

As for traffic, LVA still does quite well.

Global Rank: 161,601

US Rank: 32,411

Travel and Tourism Rank: 778

Compared to vegasmessageboard.com.

Global Rank: 199,614

US Rank: 41,858

Travel and Tourism Rank: 1,495

These days, the only way to boost message board traffic/travel site traffic without buying lots of expensive ads is through YouTube. You can still rank high in the free search results via your video content.

>>>Side Note About Scammers<<<< 

I used to business with a very large website. We had a common scammer that was running fraudulent credit cards through our systems.  The company that owned this larger web site were experts in this type of fraud. They had a team of hackers they employed to trace these scammers to their physical location.  They said the carder was likely from some 3rd world southeast Asian country. They told me the standard way they dealt with these folks that weren't reachable through the legal system was to hire some local "talent"  to dole out sufficient "punishment" to the offenders to keep them from doing it again.   

Here is one thing (probably the only thing) we can do:

Everyone...DO NOT click on those links ever.  Not even out of curiosity.  Don't look!!

  Mark says---"It didn't happen in the old forum because that message board software had been defunct for several years. Spammers aren't going to code a script for a one-off forum.

The new site performs much better and it utilizes modern secure technology."  -- Anyone else see the irony of the above statements?  So much for "modern technology".                  

No, you don't get what I am saying. It is modern and secure. That is why there are spambots. This is how it works. A programmer looks for popular software where he can write one program that will spam thousands of forums at a time with the push of one button. The programmer writes the program and then sells it to spammers and other unethical marketers. The spammer that buys the program loads a list of thousands of forums running the same software. He types in a few of his sales pitches in and it hits save. Then he pushes a button and the software creates user accounts via proxies and posts messages in thousands of forums while he sleeps. 

The next morning he checks and sees that he posted 10k messages at hundreds of forums across the Internet.  He checks his stats for the links he put up and sees that he sold only 6 vitamin supplements, but he makes $50 a sale. Simply pushing a button before he went to bed made him $300 while he was sleeping. If he repeats the process every night before he goes to bed, he has a six-figure income from simply pushing a button every night. These spammers didn't target the old forum because nobody writes a program to make a few automated posts at just one forum. There is literally no money to be made doing that. 

So when I say secure and modern, I mean the software itself isn't as vulnerable to hacking. You don't see things like you did on the old forum. Namely, injection attacks that inserted rogue code into the forum software and on the front page of the site so when someone visited the old site it downloaded malware onto the person's computer. Get it? Secure means it is difficult for hackers to breach site/software security, but you do have to put up with minor annoyances like spambots.  The spambots aren't hacking the forum.  They are just using automation to create accounts and post spam ads. The security of the site isn't compromised. 

Look on any big news site or big sports site or just about any kind of big sites that have comments and you will see the same type of spam comments that were created using these techniques. 

The only solution is to regularly take out the trash by deleting the spam. I get the same thing all the time on my Wordpress sites. You may have noticed captchas getting increasingly more difficult to solve on a lot of sites. It is because the spammers even have automated captcha solvers. The thing is as a site owner if you make it hard for people to post things with difficult captchas or other anti-spam measures legitimate people quit posting and participating because it becomes too much trouble for them to do so. 

Mark - thank you for the explanation - I was clueless as to what is involved with these spammers. 

Thanks for the compliment. 

You can't really compare Vegas Message Board and Las Vegas Advisor web traffic as a measure of message board success.  Vegas Message Board is only a message board.  Las Vegas Advisor is a major Las Vegas Content provider with multiple blogs, news, deals, and an entire bookstore and publishing house.  Forum Traffic at LVA is a miniscule portion of their web traffic.  VMB it's everything.

There was no offense intended. Someone else brought up VMB in the thread as a comparison, so I compared the two.