International Journal of Computer Science Issues

More than a traditional journal...

It\'s very important to reward the contributive users of online forums, for that almost all contents are provided by users in such forums. There should be some rewards for contributive users, and rewards should be proportional to the contributions. So the determination and measurement of user contributions are needed in online forums. At the same time, some users may do some fake contributions to obtain more rewards. In this paper, we analyzed possible frauds in online forum, examined features of each kind of fraud, and proposed some fraud-tolerant parameters according the features of frauds. Results of our experiment show that almost 81% users in the examined online forum have fraudulent activities and pure advertising users can be discovered according to the fraud-tolerant parameters we considered. On the other hand, the experiment results also show that the biggest count of fraud type detected is with the parameter minimum intervals of posts from the same users, and followed by the parameter minimum length of posts. While minimum average rate value of post after specified rates is the parameter that was used for least times. Based on the idea of this paper, frauds of user contributions could be discriminated well, and user contributions can be measured quantitatively and fraud-tolerantly, which provides a basis for online forums to reward users in various ways.