Hugo Im talking about about robots spam users not those spam idiots as you call them. When having a normal WP site noone registers, right after the installation of BP hundreds registered! If theres no specific solution its better to just answer that instead of generealizing your answer…
Im surprised the buddypress team did not come with a permanent solution about this major problem ….
What major problem and why or how could BP sort it if – no offence to BP – more mature apps can’t! If a numpty idiot is paid to post pointless irritating spam on as many sites as they can in day then what can you do other than as suggested manually approve, what would you wish to do? Or are we talking about some other issue?
Ok, I knew this is not a good option. 
This is not a buddypress only problem, it’s global. Even the best platforms around the world suffers from spammers!
I just forgot to say that, to enable auto activation of users, this plugin is needed: “BP Disable Activation” (just for others who might like that)
@themightymo I have tried that plugin with out any results. I helps for human but not for spambots that register everyday ..
@hnla thanks for your reply but Im not asking so we can solve Internets biggest problem, Im asking about a specific problem regarding buddypress.
@aminima Thanks for your suggestion, but thats not an option. Its an active community and users want to participate when they register. Approving manually it is not an option, unfortunately 
Im surprised the buddypress team did not come with a permanent solution about this major problem ….
If you run a small community, and you are able to confirm registrations, you can use the plugin “Confirm User Registration”. by this plugin, users register to your website will be activated automatically, but they cannot post anything untill you confirm their registration. If you guess the registered user might be a spammer, you can delete it before it can harm your website. Most of the time a spammer uses irregullar email addresse, or username.
Although this is not a sollution, but it can help you prevent spammers do what they want.
Spammers register on every single forum or community/blog on the net how do envisage stopping them? It’s simply a pandemic that has to be manually dealt with, there can’t be automated / plugin solutions for everything.
marking as a spammer won’t delete the account it only puts it in limbo. Why not just delete them from your dashboard. There may be some plugin to help with this but most likely it has not been updated in ages to I can’t validate their usefulness.
@aaclayton – It sounds like you have/had a plugin or theme conflict of some sort, as SI Captcha should work out of the box. Good to hear you found a plugin that works.
Hey @themightymo,
I did try SI Captcha, I was getting a strange PHP error by which the code was never successfully validated (even when entered correctly). I ended up settling on Sweet Captcha, which is a pretty neat idea, but it’s one of those annoying plugins that inserts a ton of sitewide javascript and css rules, so I’m working to hack these out with the exception of the register page.
I would still be interested in knowing how to filter user registrations though, in addition to whatever Captcha method I use I wouldn’t mind adding a honeypot as a redundant safeguard.
Which CAPTCHA plugins have you tried that have not worked?
Have you tried the following: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/
You probably found the solution by bow, just thought I should post for future reference. Also had the same issue a few weeks ago and found this: http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/security/best-practices-for-preventing-buddypress-spam-user-registrations/
Hope it helps you or the next person looking for the solution.
Just checked ,… Whenever i log into my sub sites … i get the following errors in my log file===
WordPress database error Table ‘wp_multisite.wp_3_bp_user_blogs’ doesn’t exist for query SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT b.blog_id) FROM wp_3_bp_user_blogs b LEFT JOIN wp_blogs wb ON b.blog_id = wb.blog_id WHERE wb.public = 1 AND wb.deleted = 0 AND wb.spam = 0 AND wb.mature = 0 AND wb.archived = ‘0’ AND user_id = 0 made by require_once(‘wp-load.php’), require_once(‘wp-config.php’), require_once(‘wp-settings.php’), do_action(‘init’), call_user_func_array, bp_init, do_action(‘bp_init’), call_user_func_array, bp_setup_nav, do_action(‘bp_setup_nav’), call_user_func_array, BP_Blogs_Component->setup_nav, bp_blogs_total_blogs_for_user, BP_Blogs_Blog::total_blog_count_for_user
===
Any idea what is this about?
BuddyPress requires that users activate their accounts after registering. The activation link is sent via email to the registrant. It is likely that either your php mail configuration is messed up or that the email in question went into the user’s spam folder.
In any case, you can use this plugin to manage activations: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-pending-activations/
@MickeyRoush
Thankyou very much, I’ll check these up, seems like it could be what we need…
Baffling.
We could either lower your version number, so BP would re-run the update (I have no idea if this would have any other consequence), or add the missing column in manually:
Add a new column to the wp_bp_activity table:
name: is_spam
type: tinyint(1)
NOT NULL
DEFAULT 0
Then add a new index key:
KEY is_spam (is_spam)
Before you do this, find a way to trigger the SQL error in your log. Then modify the DB table, and then try to trigger the SQL error. Hopefully that’ll be fixed, and then we can see if it affects your activity posting error. Make sure you backup your database first 
Thank you. So to know if akismet works, I will have to wait until the first spam is marked by akismet?
Ok ill give the BP Humanity plugin a go, thanks
Regarding the WP_DEBUG errors. Have you recently upgraded to BuddyPress 1.6+? There was a schema change, and we added the is_spam column in the wp_bp_activity table, and your error message says that it doesn’t exist.
Can you look inside your WordPress admin area, and check that you’ve not got some pending update action? https://i.imgur.com/MseHC.png
In your WordPress admin area, there’s a “Activity” item in the main menu list. On this page, there’s a button to filter to view only spam posts, and if any have been marked as akismet, there’s a little label nearby that says “marked as spam by akismet” etc.
yeah, i haven’t quite known what to “do” with akismet since they started charging. there is something “odd” about paying to “not get” spam — especially when anyone can “create” spam — so theoretically — akismet could make spam that gets through spam filters other than their own.
or something like that.
i have some other spam filters activated and they seem to work so it’s not biggie for now.
thnx for your feedback paul!
cheers,
dainis
Thanks for the response. I will do that. Just a quick question, after getting the Akismet API kay and installing Akismet, how do I know if Akismet works against activity spams? Is there a way for me to test that?
@megainfo @djpaul i can’t post updates to groups *or* my profile.
this is what i get with debug on (mind you no errors in chrome dev tools)
`WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘a.is_spam’ in ‘where clause’]
SELECT a.*, u.user_email, u.user_nicename, u.user_login, u.display_name FROM wp_bp_activity a LEFT JOIN wp_users u ON a.user_id = u.ID WHERE a.is_spam = 0 AND a.user_id IN ( 25 ) ORDER BY a.date_recorded DESC LIMIT 0, 20
WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘a.is_spam’ in ‘where clause’]
SELECT count(a.id) FROM wp_bp_activity a USE INDEX (user_id) WHERE a.is_spam = 0 AND a.user_id IN ( 25 ) ORDER BY a.date_recorded DESC
WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘is_spam’ in ‘field list’]
INSERT INTO wp_bp_activity ( user_id, component, type, action, content, primary_link, date_recorded, item_id, secondary_item_id, hide_sitewide, is_spam ) VALUES ( 25, ‘activity’, ‘activity_update’, ‘wec posted an update’, ‘ajax 2’, ‘http://tier1alumni.com/members/wec/’, ‘2012-11-02 00:53:15’, ”, ”, 0, 0 )
-1
`
@ A Swede in Greece
You could try this plugin:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/
But you’ll want the beta version as it fixes an issue with BuddyPress
http://www.blogseye.com/beta-test-plugins/
Also, you should look into installing ZBBlock.
http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php
The spam comment by “panlong” is still here after 2 weeks and 5 days…This says a lot about BuddyPress I think. We have started up a new site with BP, still not ready, but I think we’ll have to close it because of all spam members and spam activity, if we can not get help how to stop it. It’s UNBELIEVABLE how much spam we get. Three persons had made 100 membership each as well!!!
This Akismet plugin is for comments, but this is not so much needed as you can have comments with moderation.
I really think spam protection should be included from the beginning in the BudyPress plugin!
Another issue as well is that someone made a group without showing who created it. It doesn’t show up in the activity stream, even if I filter “created a group” either.
Something else, the page forums doesn’t show up. It says:
The forums component has not been set up yet.
What do I need to do?
