Hello BuddyPress Community.

I have a Multi-Site BuddyPress site set up and working great, but we’ve begun to have a real problem with spammer/splogger registrations being created and immediately sending spam out to our users. Some users have recently threatened to abandon the site because they feel like the volume of spam has gotten to the point where it’s too much of an inconvenience to deal with.

I’ve searched the forums and investigated some of the different plugin options, but I feel like there’s no definitive solution. It seems that the best reports are that a number of modifications or plugins resulted in a reduced volume of spam, but I’ve seen very few reports from people who found the perfect combination of methods to eliminate the problem completely.

Has anybody out there had experience totally eradicating the spammer/splogger problem?

The suggested plugins seem to fall into a number of categories:

CAPTCHA options:
– BuddyPress reCAPTCHA plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-recaptcha/
– SweetCaptcha – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/sweetcaptcha-revolutionary-free-captcha-service/

New user registration moderation options:
– BuddyPress Registration Options plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-registration-options/

Other options:
– WangGuard – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/wangguard/
– Ban Hammer – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/ban-hammer/
– Anti-Splog – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/anti-splog/

I’d love to hear about your experience dealing with this issue, including any recommendations that you believe are worth trying. Thank you very much.

Adam

[@kkradel Participant 13 years, 2 months ago]

I’ve decided to manually register users as they sign up. It is the kludgiest of solutions, but I’d rather spend my time registering good folks that hours seeking out and deleting bad.

[@igeekout Member 13 years, 2 months ago]

why not use recaptha for registration?

[@david100351 Member 13 years, 1 month ago]

The problem with recapcha is that armies of sad poor people are filling out spam registrations correctly and then passing them over to bots to do the dirty work.

[@jconti Participant 13 years ago]

Hi @drwebstein

Try again WangGuard (https://buddypress.org/community/groups/wangguard/)

We have added several detection systems to WangGuard server.

Now blocks 99’99% splog

[@mbiernat Participant 13 years ago]

I have tried everything A to Z to stop spam registration. They all work for a while, but as the site grows it is overwhelmed. I think David100351 is correct people fill out the registration and hand it to bot drones. If anyone has successfully got this under control for a big site let me know as it makes it more work than it is worth.
WordPress is brilliant with anti-spam but have not had the same results with Buddypress. I am thankful for all the work people have done with BuddyPress and know they will say it is an MU problem, but I just want to use BuddyPress without spending so much time fighting spam. Anyone else tried wangguard?

[@modemlooper Moderator 13 years ago]

It’s not an easy fix. You need various plugins to block spam but as stated above people are earning pennies to sign up to blogs. Best defense is a strong offense. Do as much as you can. Spam is a fact of life when running social sites.

Install my BuddyPress verified plugin and you can easily manage your spam accounts. I’m adding a feature in the next update that will deactivate an account automatically if that account posts too much if they are too new.

Core BP committer Paul is adding askimet filtering to the activity stream. Everyone knows spam is an issue and it’s being dealt with as best it can.