BuddyPress.org

sem101 – I use two plugins that ask questions before signup

Buddypress Humanity
and
Good Question

This prevents most of the bot sign ups that we plaguing us for some time with those group creators.

This does not stop the manual spam signups, so we have delete a few accounts each week, but it has prevented the tons that we were dealing with before.

We used to have good luck with https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-registration-options/screenshots/

but we started having some issues around bp1.7 I think. Other people say it works now (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/feature-request-new-user-moderation/ ) – but I don’t have time to play with half baked / half working solutions. Your experience with it may be fine.

We do not use si captcha any longer as we had issues with some multisite problems. I do think it slowed down some of the spammers, and certainly cost them time and a little money to get around it – so it’s cool.

I use one of the blog defaults type plugins to auto set new blogs/(sites) to have settings like ‘users must be logged in to comment’ – and “discourage search engines from indexing” – this has helped a bunch for us.

Of course the manual spammers will still need to be manually deleted – you will never stop the manual spammers, if you did, then you would stop regular people from signing up. Unless of course you went for one of those “invite only” buddypress setups.

I recently donated to a plugin author to create a new plugin that allows superadmins to force certain settings on sub-site/sub-blog users.. like forcing only allowing registered / logged in users to comment. That plugin is working, but it is not quite polished enough for wp repository release I think – but that is another kind of spam blocking issue.

Hope these tips help you, they have made a huge difference for me.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Above plugin is the only plugin you will ever require to stop spam. Donate to plugin author if it stops spam on your site to keep the plugin alive

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Above plugin is the only plugin you will ever require to stop spam. Donate to plugin author if it stops spam on your site to keep the plugin alive

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Above plugin is the only plugin you will ever require to stop spam. Donate to plugin author if it stops spam on your site to keep the plugin alive

This plugin, though not updated for a very LONG time, still works.

Might be a LITTLE help in the ongoing battle against spam!

https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/buddypress-humanity

Security question/answer can produce a text-string, not just a sum, answer.

I’m the developer of BuddyPress Security Check. Unfortunately, it appears that spammers have found a way to complete the math sum, allowing them to register. This means that BuddyPress Security Check will probably not prevent bots from registering. It certainly isn’t generating fake signups though. Probably best to disable BuddyPress Security Check until I figure out how I can fix it and release a new update.

Thanks for the ping @johnjamesjaccoby

list what you’ve done to prevent spam

I *JUST* solved my issue by updating the outdated buddypress.css — but I don’t have the spam submit button issue. I’ll have to test that. I was getting double posts regardless everywhere a comment was contributed.

-Nick

@jconti – probably best as a separate plugin rather than bundling too much in to WangGuard.

A modernised version of https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-moderation/ would be ideal, as that plugin already does most of what’s required – it just needs lots of cleanup.

Admin settings interface:

Choose which content types should get a report/flag link (including things like status updates, comments, groups, forums, members, posts, articles, etc).

Customise link text, eg. “Report %username%” or “Flag %contenttype%” etc.

Decide how many reports something needs before an automatic response is triggered. Eg. if 5 people have flagged a comment as bad, person who made that comment should get a customised message and the message should optionally be forwarded to an admin.

The message I’ve set up in BP Moderation plugin looks like this:

%AUTHORNAME%,

Several users reported your content as inappropriate:
%CONTENTURL%.

A community moderator has been notified and will review the content. If it is found to be in violation of our site terms of use, your account will be removed.

%SITENAME%

Front-end UI:

Make HTML as consistent as possible, but compatible with the UI found for the specific type of content.

Ensure there is a specific class on all flag/report links, eg. class=”abuse-button”

Ensure there is a content type specific class on each flag link, eg. class=”abuse-type-comment”

Ensure there is a state specific class on all links, eg: class=”not-flagged” or class=”is-flagged” as applicable.

Use AJAX when user flags/unflags something to avoid page refresh.

Management Interface:

There should perhaps be two management interfaces, one for site admins in the WP backend, and one for forum/group mods in the front-end.

In the backend, see BP Moderation plugin for an example.

In the front-end, it would be nice if say a group admin/moderator would get messages about problem users in their group and be able to deal with it themselves (via front-end UI, I don’t want normal users of my site going in to WP backend). This would reduce workload of WP site admins.

Spam integration:

I assume this is something native to WP but it might be from a plugin, not sure. Anyway, in admin area when you go in to Comments or Topics, etc., and hover over content items you get a spam link in the links that appear:

It would be nice if when the auto-response message is triggered (as mentioned earlier – for example after 5 people report something) it could be marked as spam. When marked as spam, content is hidden from the front-end and moved to a ‘spam’ folder on the backend. This would mean if several people report something it is temporarily hidden while an admin looks in to it – if the admin thinks it’s ok they can un-spam it, otherwise they can delete it.

I have no idea which content types / reply types support this spam thing. It would also be worth checking with whoever implemented the spam thing to see what their future plans are?

Other Notes:

If the new plugin could provide hooks so that other plugins such as WangGuard could hook in to it, that would be ideal. For example, if WangGuard sees a blacklisted word in a comment it could automatically flag it or something like that.

It would be useful if there was a record kept of how many times a user’s content has been flagged enough times to trigger auto-responses. This would enable admins to spot repeat-offenders who are regularly annoying other end-users and factor that in to any subsequent decision making (eg. should I ban that user?).

It would be nice if there was a way to auto-suspend a member account if lots of their content is getting reported/flagged. This ties in with the count thing mentioned above. So if they’ve spammed groups and forums with spammy adverts, etc., and as a result other members have reported those things several times, the offending user would be auto-suspended if they have more than say 3 items moved to spam at any given time.

Another, not sure if it’s one already mentioned: http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/how-to-tackle-spam-with-the-buddypress-spam-link-plugin/

Found some useful stuff here, but some of it is commercial :/ WangGuard in particular implements “report” links, but not sure to what extent (looks like it’s limited to activity stream?)

10 Proven Ways To Stop BuddyPress Spam

Are you sure the email is failing to send? Could the email have arrived in the user’s spam mailbox?

Hi @boblebad

The extended profile in wp-admin is available to help you moderate profiles in the WP Admin area. One of the metabox is there to spam/unspam users.

You will see the link if :
– you’re not trying to “moderate” yourself.
– you have the capacity to moderate the user.

For instance:
– an admin shouldn’t be able to moderate a super admin
– a super admin should be able to moderate an admin
– a super admin shouldn’t be able to moderate himself.

There’s an enhancement ticket on BuddyPress trac about it.

Have you tried the WangGuard plugin? It’s supposed to be good stopping spam registrations.

It could be that a spam bot has got hold of your register page’s URL yoursite.com/register – Try going to the WP admin dashboard and change the slug of the register page to something different i.e. yoursite.com/sign-up-today – That might buy you time whilst you’re figuring out the problems you mention above.

I agree. I just think you will see an increase in spam registrations.

Use wanguard.. It has stopped all spam registrations for me 100%
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wangguard/

I just installed WangGuard today on a new site I’m setting up that’s been getting slammed with several an hour, and it stopped the new faker registrations immediately. Also, I’ve been using Pie Register for a couple years on another site, and that alone has done a great job of keeping most spammer registrations out, so I put it on the new site, too. I didn’t have Akismet or anything on my other site, just Pie Registration and I was pasting a bunch of IP’s and certain words in the Settings > Discussion > Comment Blacklist, and no spam.

Pie Register has the best Captcha I’ve seen in the plugins, but what I really like is you can program random questions that the user has to put the right answer in, and that’s fun. I choose stuff that is relevant to my sites, and amusing. I was really glad it works with BuddyPress!

And I’m not affiliated with either of the above plugins, either, just another site owner who knows what it’s like trying to track down help.

Hi,
as you probably know, spam is a world wide disease and there are no ready to use solutions against it. Only tips at least.

So can you please search and read on this forum before asking for such a remaining question ?

https://buddypress.org/support/search/spam/

@sooskriszta totally agree with you on your 3 (relatively) objective tests – this is why I suggested 2 key features that need to be improved in buddypress *immediately*:

1) spam fighting
2) fragment caching

First, 99.9% of buddypress communities have to deal with spam and it is mission critical (who wants a website overrun with spam? users leave, google rank drops, etc.). How many forum threads are opened again and again about people asking for help dealing with spam? how many different methods need to be cobbled together? it just makes sense to take the best practices and build them into the core.

Second, performance is an issue that is more and more important not only because speed is a do or die issue (there is ample evidence of a direct link between a website’s speed and its success in converting and in pageview counts)

with buddypress, regular caching plugins simply do not work, we need fragment caching, and we need it YESTERDAY!

there is already a tentative step in the right direction with rarst’s fragment cache plugin but this should be developed into a full solution and built into core.

everyone will benefit from improvements in caching and it will make a MASSIVE impact on the overall quality and success of buddypress as a platform

/drops mic