BuddyPress.org

Hey guys!
I’ve got about 20k users, you thinks that maybe the emails will be tagged as spam?
Is there a delay in sending out emails?

Thanks a lot!

“how to disallow bots to follow signup link?”

Put a nofollow, noindex on it, right in the theme where it is linked. And change the default text that is linked. If you look at your access logs and your visitor stats, you’ll see they basically google for you.

@imjscn try hunting for a plugin called KB robots text it allows you to edit the WP robots text from the dashboard and might be handy to have available.

#2 stops bots following the link on other pages, but BP spammers come without a reference page. They know which link is BP register page. I’m not sure if there’s another way for BP.
Jenny this is why I said or mentioned adding a referer trap in .htaccess. Yes bots do link directly so you disallow any direct links that do not contain a referer in the header get request

True search here is a chore

Robots.txt is a file that lives in the root document directory of a site, however I seem to remember issues in the past adding one as WP might be trying to add it’s own one?

What results – if any do you get from running:

http://example.com/robots.txt (your site name obviously)

@imjscn Jenny have you tried googling on ‘nofollow’ links? before asking Andrea_r how to do this or better still have you implemented my advise earlier in the thread for a robots.txt file implementation? and other tip/s?

It’s important to tell us what you have tried other than add plugins – not everything is solvable using plugins and this aspect really requires a few approaches as has already been said.

Did you track down any of the threads on this support forum that go into great detail on the various approaches one can take, a good one is to set a referrer trap in .htaccess so that direct linking to the register page is prevented and register will only accept requests that have an accompanying referrer in the header that comes from your site – mentioned in one of those threads with example code iirc

Andrea_r, can you elaborate or point to a link that elaborates on these tactics? Thanks!

@sevenos … Is the system not sending? or are people not receiving? I had to put a warning message in the registration form to remind folks to check their junk/spam folders because 99% of all “missing” activation emails go there.

I’d double-check that the admin email is correct at yourdomain.com/wp-admin/options-general.php

Then, make sure that the emails aren’t being zapped by your SPAM filter.

Do you get regular BuddyPress notifications (friend requests, private messages, etc.) to the admin email?

Is your email hosted on the same server as your site? You might try switching the admin email to gmail or whatever to see if the emails go to that other account. Because if your email account is the same as your website domain but you host your email elsewhere (ex. Rackspace, Google Apps), your server might be trying to send the message locally.

Hello,
I have stumbled to this topic while searching how to change the time of activation link before it expires.
So, @kriskl how much time it takes before activation link expires when registering to your site?
I have similar problem. The default time of 2 hours looks like very insufficient for users. We have almost no spam registrations and still there are many abandoned registrations.
On the net there is no easily reachable info how to change this configuration. I have posted two threads on WP.com, still no news. Hope some of you people can help or give an idea where is that php that sets the time period.

10x

https://buddypress.org/developers/nuprn1 rich! etiviti wrote a suite of plugins one of which is ‘BuddyPress Restrict Group Creation’
Don’t allow your members to sign up and instantly create groups set a time period they have to wait, spammers won’t wait, genuine members will not mind if it’s clear to them they have to wait a few hours, a day or whatever.

it’s no solution and pointless running as yet one more plugin, this is simply a Order Allow Deny Apache directive and would be placed in you httpd.config file preferably or in your .htaccess and then list IP or domains to deny. Blocking IPs isn’t something that should be done lightly as it can have repercussions and is only effective on domains if there is one specific troublemaker these spam bots use spoofed domains they will change on the fly so little point trying to block them.

Preventing spam is a multi faceted approach and the many areas and things that need to be done covered at length on the support forum, you need to use all of them to effectively reduce spam and if possible don’t let people sign up for blogs from the sign up page

@arezki … so … does this plugin block attempts to sign up? How does it determine if something should be blocked? I looked at the plugin file on WP.org and it isn’t very specific. I can go into my server cpanel and block IPs all day long and I still get tons of spambots. I get user activation keys and blog setups with out a spambot actually doing the compelte process. grrrr.

Andrea_r, can you put that into English please? Pretend I’m a total newb.

I haven’t found a good solution yet. Heck, I can’t even figure out how to delete spam groups that are now popping up on my site.

The trouble with a social network is, you don’t want to seal it off and make it so that no one can sign up. That would defeat the purpose. But you have to have a way of confirming new members are who they are. Using some kind of program that would check a member’s sign up credentials would be nice. A passport of sorts. Any ideas there? Facebook connect could work, I guess.

Try to put the plugin: si-captcha-for-wordpress, this works on buddypress.

It’s not caused by the BuddyPress registration process, I can tell you that much

Is the blog they own or one of the blogs they belong to been marked spam if so, I think this happens to users created.

I am having the same problem. Any solution found on this at all?
Please help!

This issue is one that has been discussed at length in various threads over the months here, and many approaches to tackling the issue are given.

Please do a search for these threads and have a detailed read through and implement a few of the suggestions they provide.