Re: Spam registrations
These automated bots are usually just that, automated that are programmed to look for specific strings in search engines that return a list of buddypress sites and then harvested. I was getting hammered with 20+ blogs getting created a day that was spam. I tried ever plugin and .htaccess tricks known to man and none of them worked. I was tired of all of the spam I was getting so I put on my tin foil and went to war. I was determined to win this war and to stop 99.9% of automated spam dead in its tracks.
First I went to cpanel and under the “Website Traffic” on the left side of the page and clicked “View all traffic” then clicked on my domain name.
When the statistics page for that domain loaded I looked on the left hand side of the page for “Search Keyphrases”, this will show me a list of the keyphrases that was used to find my site.
I found all the keyphrases that was used by the spammers to find my site in the search engines and here is the list of the keyphrases.
1. intext create an account username required email address required blog details inurl register
2. to start connecting please log in first. you can also create an account. .cr. blogs
3. allintext create an account account details profile details blog details yes i d like to create a new blog
4. yes i d like to create a new blog
5. “blog url required ” inurl /register
6. “yes i’d like to create a new blog”
7. intext create an account blog details inurl register
8. to start connecting please log in first. you can also create an account. .be.blogs
9. inurl register yes i d like to create a new blog
10. intext blogs create an account username email address blog details inurl register
11. to start connecting please log in first. you can also create an account. .de.
What I did was I went downloaded the buddypress to my desktop and open every file with NotePad++ and started searching for “create an account; blog details; yes i d like to create a new blog” Once I found those strings, I changed the name to something else and on the registration page I removed the “yes i/d like to create a new blog” along with its checkbox completely and i searched everything with the word “blog” and changed it to something completely different. I Also renamed the “bp-blog.php” and the /bp-blog/ folder.
Make sure to search through the other files in the buddypress folder for anything calling the “bp-blog.php” and the /bp-blogs/ and rename it accordingly.
It has been a week since I done this and I have yet to be spammed. I went from 20 a day to zero overnight by doing this.