Yeah, I have tested with an existing and brand new Gmail-account.
I do not think it is related to the domain, as I have tested this with 3 different BP-installs on 3 different domains. I have also tested this on a fresh BP-install without external Plugins installed.
It is only happening with the e-mail which includes the Registration-Code. Only the e-mail which says “Activate your Account…..” is landing in the Gmail-Spam-Folder.
The other e-mail which says “Dear User, Your new account is set up…..” is NOT landing in the Spam-Folder.
no, my domain is a normal and serious one. Should not be landing in any Spam-Folder.
I remember DJ-Paul saying that the e-mail text needs to be customized which will prevent it landing in the Spam-folder. Not sure about that…. ?
the trouble is that this e-mail is landing in the Spam-Folder at Gmail of users.
Is there a way to avoid this ?
Many thanks,
On my site I see a similar problem with a small difference, I have people register which makes them a “Subscriber” but they never confirm by email. I am not sure that all of them get the new user email or if my host trash cans some of them.
Anyway, this leaves me with registered WP users that are not site members in Buddypress.
My wish list would be for a plugin that would allow me to delete any WP user that had not confirmed in some time period.
This is a self hosted site with WP 2.9.2 and the users cant write to the blogs so I don’t have that clean up to worry about.
Ed
http://www.carvingbuddy.com
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When a user registers but they do not activate, they are marked as a spammer and their profile get this message:
“This user has been marked as a spammer. Only site admins can view this profile.”
The problem is that the only way I have found to change their status is go into the database. There needs to be another way for the admin to automatically activate them. Also, when they log in, they should get a message that they are not activated and need to do that. I have had several users who signed up and either lost or forgot to register.
If anyone else is running into this problem you need to go into your database in the users table and change the user_status from 2 to 0.
This smells like.. spam/scam. Allowed?
I’ve actually used this to my advantage on mine, because if it doesn’t work, and it often doesn’t, the alternative – which is always an option anyways is having members set up accounts at gravatar in order to display avatars correctly. You can disable the gravatar upload on your site on the general components set up. Just click yes to the disable gravatar uploads.
The benefit is, that is an additional verification step to your website users to prevent against spammers. Then set your default to the ones provided in your dashboard. They don’t like that their avatar displays like that. so they go get a gravatar account so that their custom avatar displays. On some of my sites, I actually have added the option to add members gravatar accounts to their profile for cross promotional purposes. I do have a member that has gotten a gravatar and has her gravatar link listed.
Well… with regards to SPAM… I’m not certain… but I suspect that’s actually BuddyPress-related.
This is a fact. I “bugged” my registration pages and spent the weekend watching spammers in their natural habitat. My findings confirm that, if you do nothing special to protect your site, BuddyPress is absolutely, definitely associated with an additional spam burden over and above what you get with WP and WPMU.
It’s another great example of a problem that is not WP, it’s not BP – it’s a “synthesis” problem. Though the solution is definitely a BP one (not ready to report it yet, for fear of jinxing my progress).
Well… with regards to SPAM… I’m not certain… but I suspect that’s actually BuddyPress-related. I’ve never had that issue on any of my other WordPress sites. But my BuddyPress sites are rife with SPAM signups. No matter what I do it seems. The only solution I found (after trying literally everything I could find here and at wpmu) was to block all proxy methods.
You need to distinguish between whether it is a user interface issue, and if it isn’t, where the code/functionality is provided.
For example, BuddyBar is obviously a BuddyPress user interface feature. The code which is called when a user is marked as a spammer is in WordPress. The code that deletes a spammer’s activity from the Activity Stream is BuddyPress.
I am actually new to BP. I’ve been a wp geek for a year now. I saw mu around for a while and got curious about it. I installed a BP on one of my domains and fell in absolute love. I use as many plugins as I can and are necessary to run the sites. So I’ve become familiar very quickly will all of its antics. I’m still in development phase but I am confident that SEO Support Bay can provide many services to many people ranging from usage to design, marketing & development and the functionality of just making money online. SEOSB was the site I designed after setting up a dozen sites using BP because I found that there were some obvious spammers joining the site so I set it up as a doc site mainly. Considering I also use Simple Facebook Connect, the necessity was to create one tou page, help page and privacy page for that to update rather than the daunting task of setting up one of those pages for each of my sites. I’m still testing if this theory can be a connecting hook between all my facebook apps and pages for massive cross promotion – I hope so! . As well, SEOSB is a playground site for this aspiring dev. I love designing & tinkering with everything I can WP BP.
You can visit SEOSB here – http://seosupportbay.com
Just to clarify, I’m not in favour of disabling email activation, either. The spam you’d be getting would kill your site.
However, the site I was doing this for does not allow users to post status updates in the conventional form. The site is an anonymous image sharing site. Users need to be registered to submit an image, but they needn’t be registered as themselves. Every user has the option of using [username]@domain.ext as their email address if they choose to stay anonymous.
Status updates are replaced by img tags to the uploaded image. Yes, they could spam in activity comments, but I guess that’s a risk that had to be taken. Until someone figures out how to use akismet on those comments too…
You don’t want to delete users if they pose threats to your community because they can re-register using the same creds if you do so and they will continue to be a nuisance to you and your community forever if such is the case. I’m new to using bp, but have already figured out that to get rid of these suckers, this is what you do the easy way.
Go to your user area in your dashboard – checkmark the user, change role to “blocked user”. Then, from the front end of your site, from your front end admin panel, go to the user and up top in admin options it will give you the options of what to do, mark them as a spammer. It doesn’t delete them, as I said – you don’t want to. But it disables them from everything and prevents them from being a neverending nightmare to your site.
Lately, I’ve been seeing responses like this to BuddyPress help requests:
- Spam registration is a WPMU problem, not a BuddyPress question…
- Deleting users is a WordPress function, not a BuddyPress question…
- Hiding the admin panel is a WordPress question…
As a developer I agree, but as a site admin, I feel this is a bit like saying “I’m not worried about my lung cancer… It has nothing to do with my brain.” 
WordPress is the “host”, but when BP is activated, BP/WP two are inseparable in some unique, exciting, and very complicated ways. It creates a whole lot of very unique issues that are NOT adequately resolved outside of BuddyPress specific resources, such as this forum. If you are a site admin, every one of these issues must be rethought and solved in the context of BuddyPress.
A good example is the BuddyBar. Plainly, it offers admin functions such as Delete User and Mark as Spam, yet I still hear people say that marking spammers and deleting spam blogs is a WPMU issue. We can’t have it both ways, in my opinion!
When I have my developer hat on, it’s clear as day what is a WP vs. BP issue, but when I put on my admin hat, there is no such distinction. It’s like pouring black and white paint in the same can, and then telling somebody to paint the living room using the black paint only.
In all honestly, I wouldn’t recommend disabling email verification. In fact – you actually should not only use that, but use it with Gravatar to double verify members. My BP communities are brand new, in dev stages right now. I’ve already been subjected to spammers which is why I support use of Gravatars – because not only will your users be verified in your community, but globally and this is a big step in spam prevention.
If you want to customize the registration page, many of them can be through your theme framework. However, too much code will slice your page & overall framework right down the middle and break your site.
@all
I’m using these 3 plugins together and have no bot signups at all on WPMU2.9.2/BP1.2.3.
Cookies for Comments
RPX
WPMU Super Captcha
The occasional stubborn human does drop by once in a blue moon, and these few only manage to get through using RPX and an existing account, or they really take the time to fill out the registration form. Email domain banning and persistent account termination seem to be the only solutions in these cases.
Can someone give solution that users that wish to sign up dont use buddypress signup page, instead they use regular wordpress signup which is much much safer.
Hmm, interesting. The generic BuddyPress register form does seem like a bit of a sieve (though it could just be my frustration talking).
I think you would just delete/disable /registration/activate.php and /registration/register.php. You would lose the ability for users to fill out extended profile fields at signup. However, quick signups are probably preferable, with seasoned users filling out extended profile fields as needed. I’ve read at least one article via delicious.com that suggests to me that signup forms need to be as simple as possible to help users focus on getting “behind the wall” fast and easy.
excuse my ignorance of htaccess but is this even possible? and if so, how is it done?
I noticed a issue with spammers using CURL to download /registration so blocked that in .htaccess (It’s been mentioned on a thread somewhere how to)
sometimes it depends on your host too. emails from my default bp install on dreamhost tend to make the junk/spam folder (yahoo, gmail, etc)
I have the same issue. Tried installing plugins, changing email to a “legit” one rather than the standard noreply@xxxx.xxx, tried sending through SMTP rather than mail()
Nothing works.
Most likely Hotmails spam filter reacts to the activation link, that would be my guess at least.
check your spam folder – that site is on a shared host (dreamhost) – so emails typically get junked easily.
yep, that is the ticket 
(i’m a fan of having a date_modified col in db – so hopefully that could happen here and then a site admin could have a choice on what to sort on)
but this hack (while you do not have to touch any core files) will mess with intention of the date_recorded value (but saves the original in the activity meta table)
If you click on any of your user’s avatar or username, you’ll see a new menu item in your admin bar called Admin options where you may edit the user’s profile, avatar, mark as spammer and delete the user.
So far, every single spam-fighting technique I have tried for BP has failed. My next step is to modify Invisible Defender to work better with BuddyPress. If you use Invisible Defender in an attempt to stop BP spam/splog registrations, you may want to add these lines to your invisible-defender.php file:
//Protect Buddypress register form
add_action( 'bp_before_registration_submit_buttons', array( &$this, 'add_hidden_fields' ) );
add_action( 'bp_signup_validate', array( &$this, 'bp_registration' ), 10, 0 );
Add them right above this:
//Protect Buddypress register form
These modifications come courtesy of Chris Wright: http://bcbc.co.uk/mu/blog/2009/12/11/wordpress-registration-spam/
I’m trying to stay positive and constructive here, but my BuddyPress install is so overrun with spam that it’s essentially becoming unusable.
I had the same problem a few seconds ago. A newly registered member didn’t recieved the activation email but was listed in WordPress>Backend>Users
I asked the user to check spam inbox twice but there was stil no activation mail
It would be great if admins could manually acivate such users or resent the activation email.
I’m getting several spammers signing up, I have the Anti Splog plugin (here) and the reCAPTCHA is turned on.
Email Activation is turned on.
AND I’ve blocked all of the emails on this list (here)
HOW ARE THEY GETTING THROUGH!
