Deleting a forum

I was thinking of getting rid of my forum on my site. It only has about 500 posts and only a few active members. I just can't keep up with the spam anymore and while the site is very popular the forum makes the site look not popular.

We rank pretty well for our keyterms and I do not want to do anything that would affect this.

Would you think that deleting the forum would have a negative impact on our rankings with the 500 decrease in pages?

what is the forum? PHP? Are they indexed? Do they bring in lots of traffic on their own? I have alot of forums and don't think handling spam is hard.....

i would perhaps reduce the number of categories you have to give the impression of more posts and more activity.

Worst case scenario you should close registration to the forum. This way you can keep all your content and not have any new spam!!!

I've never managed a forum, but reducing the number of categories sounds like a good idea. It of course won't help with the spam problem.

raz

The categories are pretty limited (about 8) and its gambling related so the spam is out of control. I'll get 15 new spammers a day that register. Sometimes they make normal posts then go back a month later and edit their post to add their spammy links! SOBS.

I accidently deleted the forum posts by doing a pruning and haven't done a forum backup in awhile so I guess that solves my problem. If I can find a somewhat non-dated backup I'll try reducing the forums to 3-4 and see how that goes. Its frustrating as #*#& logging in after one day to see 30 spam posts in a row.

-It's a phpbb forum and from what I hear that's one reason it was so hard to combat spam.