No I turned of caching. For instance, I just deleted a bunch of spam registrants. The last spam registrant with a blog, their theme is taking over my home page. I don’t have any posts in my root blog.
Instead of looking at banning users, I would be more concerned with preventing spam signups.
That way you won’t have to think about banning people (at least not often!)
Hello
using capcha image for spam.
point 3 OK!
point 4 OK!
but point 1,3 very imortant
Hello
Point 4 is a standard WPMU option and can be found in the Site Options panel of the admin interface.
Photo albums are something that will become a part of BuddyPress eventually (i.e. don’t hold your breath). There is an interim plugin you can use which provides a photo gallery to BuddyPress. I haven’t used it myself but you can find it on https://buddypress.org/extend/plugins/.
The big problem I can see with point 2 is that you are inviting spammers and vandalism in to your site.
Seems to work wonderfully on 1.0.3.
I wish there was a way to let the user enter an invite message though. As it is, the message appears to come from the BP admin, and it looks super skynet. Don’t want to give the appearance that my site is spamming people… At any rate, it’s a brilliant plugin, and I appreciate all the hard work!
http://thegsn.org
I just wanted to add that I am using the following plugins:
SiteWide
bppicture-album
Welcome Pack
Bp-dev core
BP-dev groups extra
Others:
Most Active Blogs
Seo for buddypress
As well as the following in the mu-plugins folder:
bp-events
bp-featured members-widget
blog_defaults
plugin-commander
typepadAntiSpam
restrictprofiles
Buddy Press rocks.
One monetization idea for you guys — Akismet for message-spam…like that plague of MySpace message spam. I’ll hopefully have some better contributions for the BuddyPress pot-luck put together soon. 
Morning all! I got rita-ized as well!
Yep… definitely need some type of anti-spam filter, in addition to Jeff’s upcoming privacy component.
I have not tested it yet but I am guessing it sends the activation link anyway (since the author mentions that a random password will be generated if one is not provided) which is fine by me as it will help somewhat to thwart spammers.
Brajesh, is there a way to have the user enter the password twice (like in other registration forms) to make sure it is entered correctly as the user wants?
Hey, I didn’t receive a spam message. I guess I’m just not popular. ;(
@socialpreneur-
The BuddyPress Privacy component will allow users the ability to decide who can send them PMs.
I received a spam message from rita4u as well.
Those kind of messages seems to appear on lots of communities nowadays, I guess its impossible to remove them automatically. 
Since nobody has figured this out yet, I was wondering, maybe there might be a different way. Such as when people signup, it automatically logs them in upon signup. Then while it automatically logs them in, it leads them to the change the password/profile page.
Although, it would be great to see buddypress profile section to actually have the option to change passwords, as right now we have no other choice but to edit the passwords in the wp profile area.
Hopefully, somebody will get this figured out, as it is a horrible idea to send out e-mails in this manner, because most of the time the e-mail could get lost or placed into the spam areas or the e-mails can become delayed and users never check for it, or they just don’t bother to login because they are concerned that they may not have the option to change their passwords so readily.
Time will tell. But, there needs to be a way to automatically log people in upon them creating their own account, then they can change their passwords as they like. Otherwise, if they don’t change their password right there upon auto login, they will still be e-mailed the password that the website created for them by default.
Hey all, sorry to bump and old thread, but it’s related, I promise 
I’ve installed reCAPTCHA in the plugins folder, and it works brilliantly for comments. (For that matter so does wmpu-captcha in the mu-plugins folder) But neither seem to work on the registration page.
Working – http://thompsonjason.org/2009/04/11/hello-world/#comments
Not Working – http://thompsonjason.org/register
Is there a bit of code that I should be inserting into my registration page to make reCAPTCHA show up. I’ve been getting a lot of spam accounts being created lately, so I really need to get this going before we can launch the site. Any help is greatly appreciated.
is it complete? can we have an update? I’m cleaning my site often! The bots are bad!
I just recovered from a bad spam incident on my buddypress site. A user (who looked legit) suddenly started private messaging the whole community with obviously spam material resulting in some very angry members 
I will go ahead and install Akismet and a captcha during registration H.owever, is it true that each user has to obtain their own key from wordpress.com and plug it into Akismet to get it to work? Is there an alternative that I can just activate for everyone? Or can I just provide all my members with my key to activate their akismet?
Also, what steps have other BP admin used to prevent the kind of spam that I mentioned above? I do not think Akismet & the captcha during registration would have helped in this situation.
Is there a plugin that flags users who message a lot of users in a short time? Something like that might help fight spammers.
Thanks.
Bump..
still looking for help on how to edit the screen that comes up right after you enter your registration information. Thanks.
@plrk, I guess the check you junk mail message would be best on second register screen (the one that comes up after clicking next. However I am unable to find the code to edit to add the message. Can anyone tell me which file it resides in?
The inner workings of the e-mail spam detectors are strange and mysterious. You are probably right in that having your mail sent by a server on a domain hostname different than the domain specified in the “from” field in the mail (your domain) counts against them. I’d set up a big “check your junk mail” blurb as suggested above, and recommend your members to mark all BuddyPress e-mails as “not spam”.
I notice that all the emails that are going out by my website have mailed by: gator754.hostgator.com in the details section (I am checking in gmail).
Could this be the reason they are going to the spam folder?
Thanks Mike,
I have been trying to figure out how to include that in the screen that comes up after a user enters their registration details and clicks next. Would you know what I have to edit?
Actually the problem is not only with activation emails..all emails generated by buddypress (alerts about private messages etc) seem to be going to the spam folders.
Hi again Mike,
I checked into Ning quite some time ago. I was never comfortable with their spam protection or was I comfortable putting my data in the hands of some outside organization. By concerns turned out to be well founded.
“Clients of Ning are outraged [Link disabled by Ning] over a decision that Ning made public last week. The software maker sent out an email to all of its clients, those who have created a social network on Ning, stating that they would email all members of all websites who use the Ning software to promote the newly designed Ning.com.
http://www.chartingstocks.net/2009/03/ning-exposed-tech-company-ning-scams-its-clients/
“Please do not send the email to my members. I pay you not to advertise on my site and I don’t think you should target my members directly,†says one Ning network creator and paying customer. Ning charges network creators to keep all Ning promotional links off their site. Some members have been paying this fee for years and so are even more upset at the direct email marketing campaign. Why pay the fee?
To make matter worse, the new Ning.com combines all member data from all websites created using the Ning system. The owners of the websites have no option to opt out or remove their members. There’s going to be a lot of explaining to do when members see their own picture, profile, and information on Ning.com, a website that most members have never even heard of.”
There are other white label sites, but they all basically have the same problem. I, the owner, am beholden to whoever is running the software for me. I have no control.
Rich
off the top of my head, the only idea i have would be to include a little blurb about checking junk mail/setting up a filter prior to signing up. i’ve seen some services do this usually in big bold letters.
yea he registered twice on my blog!!! whats it all about buddy
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the reply. I will check out your comparison.
I have quite a bit experience with Links.com using WordPress, and there is no question that spam is going to become a major problem unless I clamp down early on. The current plugins are inadequate for a social networking site on my domain. The last thing I want is to appear on some blacklist list. It has already happened once and it was a huge effort clearing thing up.
Thanks again for your response.
Rich
BuddyPress runs on WPMU, so you can run most WP plugins your BP installation including Akismet or whatever other spam plugin(s) you’re using — that would take care of the blogs. As far as spam coming from actual registered users, that could be another issue. I wouldn’t anticipate this becoming a big problem in the first place, because a BP user has to register (get an email) and then confirm (get another email) registration before getting started to spam anybody. By the time that *could* happen and BP user John Doe decides to spam link everybody on the Wire and elsewhere, you as the admin could just suspend/delete his account. I’d say go for it. I love this system the moment and wrote a lengthy comparison between BP and another system, Elgg, here… http://www.michaelkuhlmann.com/category/buddypress/elgg-vs-buddypress/
There’s also another social networking system out there for Joomla called Anahita, in case you’re interested. Hope this helps!
