BuddyPress.org

Go to your profile page https://buddypress.org/community/members/synaptic/profile/edit/group/1/ and make “Name (required)” different from your username. One way to prevent spammers’ posts from appearing in activity streams.

The only change to the database structure for BP 1.6 is to the bp_activty table. We’re adding the following column, and index:

is_spam tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
KEY is_spam (is_spam)

Not sure, first time I’ve seen this. Upgrade via wp-admin or upload manually
-> to latest version BuddyPress 1.5.6
-> to latest version bbPress 2.0.3 (if you’ve got sitewide forums)

And a parting final comment or two on what does tend to become a wearisome topic:

Spam is pandemic across internet sites, all internet sites that have a member/registration system suffer from spammers – it is not! a problem that BP has more than any other app.

It’s annoying to have to go in every day and delete these users

And here is the rub so to speak; you DO! have to go in everyday and manage your site, how could you not think that wasn’t important or even vital? Any site of the type ‘Forum’ or ‘blog’ has to be managed and that really has to be realised why run a site if your not prepared to… run it – it’s why there are ‘admin’ roles!

I perform admin / moderator duties on a fairly large tech forum running Drupal we number six mods and each and every day we each deal with two or three spammers each this is over and above the measures put in place to deal with spam bots.

There are primarily two types of spam bots(automated) and humans(real people) There are a number of tricks and tips to dealing with bots and by and large there are actually pretty effective, these approaches and been linked to quite often so search those out and implement. As for humans this is the real issue, there isn’t a lot you can do about people registering on your site then posting garbage – not unless you close of membership or restrict membership – you have decided to run a open registration member site so really you need to get with the plot and understand that you WILL be spammed, if you find it too much trouble to visit your site once a day or to appoint further admins in your community that can deal with it then expect, when you do finally visit to have a lot more spam to deal with and for those spammers to have had the luxury of unfettered access to promote their links or harass your members – It really is your choice how you run your site but please please stop hunting round for this magic ‘thing’ that stops all spam dead it does not! exist.

Blimey. I’d like to reassure that there’s no conspiracy theory (but I would say that, right?), nor is the BuddyPress.org team ignoring posts on these forums. We are all volunteers, and we only have so much time that we can contribute. This thread is not heading in a constructive direction so I am going to close it.

Mercime’s answer above was good as any. It takes a lot of effort from lots of people to try to prevent spam. This thread talks about user registration spam and activity spam. In our next version of BuddyPress, 1.6, Akismet is integrated into Activity Stream. We have this running on testbp.org and it seems to be doing a decent job at helping.

@Tina but isn’t it interesting that they supposedly have so many people keeping an eye open for spammers but so many important posts go unanswered. LOL I’m calling BS on that one. A completely unused Buddypress site is having new registrations and posts on average of every 5 minutes and sometimes less. But yet this site is virtually spam free. What’s the secret? Why can’t Akismet block the Buddypress spam?

I was also surprised to discover that when a user is marked as a spammer, no action is taken to delete or hide the messages they have sent from users.

When a user is marked as a spammer, surely Buddypress should prevent all other users from seeing messages they have sent? Can this be added to a future version?

@richardpd check out http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/security/best-practices-for-preventing-buddypress-spam-user-registrations/ plus tips from commenters as well.

Thank you Paul. That is exactly what I needed. The Mail From plug in corrected this issue for me.

To clarify, un-activated user accounts will show in WordPress, but not in BuddyPress.

There are genuinely a lot of reasons why your web server may not be sending emails. The activation key is contained in this email. As a first step — and I’m sure someone will post here with a much more complicated answer soon — contact your web host and ask them if they support PHP’s mail() function; specifically, is PHP configured fully to send emails.
Most web servers can send emails, but the ‘From’ headers are not properly set, so most of the time, they don’t get delivered to the recipient properly.

If they come back and say that the From address in the email doesn’t match the name of your site (quite often this occurs in a virtual server situation), try https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mail-from/

If that doesn’t work, or they say you need to specify an SMTP server, try https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/configure-smtp/

I am having the same activation key problems. Members who are trying to register are not receiving an email.