BuddyPress.org

Hi, am very sure that the rest members you cant see are spam or they did not activate their account via the activation key sent to them. it has happened to me before. firstly go to wp admin, and go to users, then check how many users you can see. if it is 523.

regards

Have you checked whether your server can send emails? Have your users checked their spam boxes? They ought to be receiving an email with an activation link.

Tell ALL your group administrators to do this in their group to make the forums work properly. If there is over 100K groups, you must have a LOT of group owners, or, 90% of them are spam groups.

If they are spam, you must go in and delete them all.

Put a noindex on your signup link. Look at your access logs – I bet the majority of spammers do a google search then hit your site.

@pisanojm you raise some very valid points about spamming over here… but tell me, why is it that you chose to avoid the “confirmation email link” option… its a sureshot way of overcoming most of the automated spam-bots out there… yes, you can still have manual registrations who want to mess with your site… but this is something we just have to deal with.

Max we as admin can do is to spot the bad guys (community flagging), and delete there stuff as well as bar them from registering again… atleast thats my opinion.

Sid.

I would like to add that I’m also looking for a mod/hack/plugin that would allow someone OTHER than administrators at the ADMIN USER ROLE LEVEL to mark spammers and edit text on all of the streams while NOT giving the access to the ADMIN-side of the Back end… a real problem on our site…. because of this I have few ADMINS with the ability to do this type of BASIC “global” moderating across all groups/forums, etc…

Here is a recap of some posts I posted at http://buddydev.com recently:

I use Bp-Cosmic-Pro Theme built of of bp-mag and have about one spam registration per couple of weeks (and it’s usually a real person that registers and gets through)… They are caught within minutes of posting something ridiculous and marked as spammers by the admins.

There are a number of reasons for that:

1. It’s a closed/ register only site (but free to all), (note: I do not require e-mail validation either)
2. I use BuddyPress Humanity Anti-Spam Plugin
3. I use Si-Captcha Anti-Spam
3. Multiple Profile fields are required to be filled-in at registration as an ANTI-SPAM measure – in part.
4. I have a TERMS and use that Requires THE CHECKING of a box to register.
5. I use the bad behavior plugin to keep out the crazies and use the Blocking-list feature of it.

Occasionally, I get the I can’t register e-mail, but it is rare and there is a note for people to contact me if they can’t register properly… I have 1700 active (non-spam users) on my site and virtually no SPAM.

I believe one of the keys to success here is that it is a “private site” and as such it’s not indexed (I realize this could be a problem for many sites, but not my niche site). So, sites don’t scrape it as a potential source to attack.

I would also recommend the ANIMAL BuddyPress Captcha plugin.

*****************************

I usually think about SPAM protection in the form of a Castle for open community WordPress Sites:
1. The Moat: Programs like Bad-Behavior and plugins that stop bots/scrapers before they get “through” to the site.
2. The Gate/Drawbridge: Programs like Captchas, Math Challenges, Reverse fields that SHOULDN’T be filled in to “trap” bots from auto-filling.
3. The Keep: Programs like Akismet.
4. The Guards: Moderators with the ability to knock out spam when they see it.

The biggest issue with BuddyPress is that THERE IS NO KEEP (no. 3 above) for the Activity Streams…
As far as I know, there are not programs like Akismet or any of the “KARMA” / Comment anti-spam plugins that work for the BuddyPress group/activity/forum streams… DJ-PAUL has talked about making Akismet work on BuddyPress Streams at the BuddyPress.org site, but there is nothing yet that I know of yet –

If anyone does know of something that will “auto-moderate” the BuddPress Stream updates/comments, please let me know…

Regards.

Reality is that you would have to be proactive in killing those spam robots and human spammers if you have open registration. Search through BP.org shows many threads which share tips in plugins to use to prevent this and not all are 100% perfect since these spammers are really gung-ho about overcoming such preventions. Having said that, check out this thread – https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/has-anyone-tried-this-spammer-blocking-plugin-with-buddypress/

That is excellent news.

As Andrea_r pointed out earlier Not being sent and not being received are two different things You need to establish which of these two you are actually refering to. How have you tested your email functions? Have you checked through any mailer-daemon returned undeliverable notifications? What sort of accounts do the people have that are not receiving anything, Hotmail or the like? Have you set up PTR RDNS records and SPF records? failing to set these two records will almost certainly cause certain PITA email servers to bounce the email straight out and won’t even pass it as spam.

Ran a quick check and you appear to have no real mailbox/email server as your domain reports no MX records so not sure how people contact you under that domain, you have what looks to me a correct ptr record and it reports a canonical cname record that I’ve not seen appear in the context of a ptr check, there is no record of a SPF entry which isn’t unusual but some email servers will reject based on lack of available SPF record to lookup. It would be worth you checking with whomever set your dns records that all is correct and with your host that RDNS is set up and correct. These aspects can and will cause issues if not correct.

Greg’s an old client.

Sometimes we have room to troubleshoot stuff, sometimes we don’t. It’d basically be an hour consult.

@andrea_r

Gee, if that’s a service you offer, I’d be interested once I finally get my multisite project off the ground!

One of these days I’ll need to poke around your install (again) and see why they keep getting in.

I have it on my setup right now. I’m not sure that it’s doing anything for BP, to be honest, but I also don’t know how to check I looked at the plugin page on my wp-admin side and it’s all `./wp-comments-post.php` down the board.

Cookies for Comments works, though.

Thanks MikeyD. Don’t quite understand why he spammed the topic with my site however.

I am currently writing my own theme that looks nothing like BP-default, but I’ve been on trac almost daily with the UI tickets. I don’t know if we need a dedicated “UI/UX” team, but as long as folks are submitting on those tickets it will ease some of the other dev’s needing to mess with it. I DO think it is an important component with BP and we need to keep talking about 1.3’s problems.

I’m glad to see all the discussion going on, especially in light of all the “BP IS DEAD” nonsense. I think the biggest issue is how the forums make it hard to actually talk, but the testBP forums are great and I’m excited to see them go live here. I’m also anxious to see the new BP.org which seems to be slated to June.

My biggest issue with the BP sites I run is spam. Even my non indexed test servers get spammed. My AIGA site was deleting 250 spam users/blogs a day before shutting off new user registration. The first part of that comes from spam users being registered. There are two types of spam services, bots, and (slave) labor. These folks get through the Captcha’s and set up real fake accounts. But in my experience with my comment forms adding a Captcha killed a vast majority of spamers. Then with comments, contact forms, etc this would kill most spam. From there heuristic spam fighting from splogs, comments, etc. Also a system that users can mark a item as spam would help a ton.

Second, its that to learn how to do ANYTHING in BP I have to take something that works with the current version and hack it a part to figure out basic commands and actions. Once the new site is up I think there should be a real push on getting the Codex up to snuff(look at jQuery and WP) that have examples, resources, etc. Then have tutorials on things, hell syndicate them from other bloggers.

So as my thing(s) I want to keep being a part of fixing UI issues, and will as long as I can.
I want to write for the Codex, and am here and willing to write Blog articles for BP. Tutorials, Updates, whatever. I’m game. I will be writing tutorials for AIGA members anyway, so why not sync the content here.
I am working on the Group Documents plugin with its original developer because my sites need it.

And lastly I will be writing a BP-Spam component. I will do it as a plugin first and will want/need tons of feedback. But to get the University to sign off on my project I will need to stop all the Viagra and other inappropriate content from making it through. I will do this regardless of it being a part of BP but want to give back however I can.

I’m so psyched to see all the energy is still in this project!