Hi,
Just noticed that I had a spammer create a fake profile on my site and then somehow rapidly post an insane amount of activity posts on the site. Is this common? Is there any way to prevent this?
By the way, I’m new here and was unable to search these forums effectively, in case this question has been addressed before. Any assistance for future searches would be greatly appreciated. 
I use the oddly-named but highly effective Wangguard plugin.
You can check your existing list and purge sploggers who have signed up, and tighten up the registration system to prevent them getting accounts in the first place:
http://wangguard.com/
Hi – Firstly this seems to be a very nice plugin well done guys. I have two problems if someone can help.
1. I have been invaded by some t**t recruitment company who have add 218 members/activities spamming their recruitment services. The odd thing is I cannot find them anywhere in the dashboard. I know I can go and remove them from the database, but I am worried to put my site live until I understand how to stop them doing this.
2. When I login as a user, the first page does not seem to pick up the css file. If I refresh the page or go to a different page, it seems ok. Any ideas?
Thanks for your help
Are they in a spam or junk folder?
Have you tried installing https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/ then use it to send a debug email? It can show where an email gets stuck and error codes that can be googled….
@mercime,
I’ve verified that the BP files on our BlueHost server are in agreement with the table published following step 5 of the activation wizard outline.
Given this fact, do you suppose I might have a good BP install and simply need to work through the Genesis Child Theme tempate issues to get a good presentation outcome for BP?
Genesis Connect claims to make changes in the way log ins are handled and reports in the Genesis Connect support forum as follows:
**************Quote
Actually, GC *does* offer extra functionality, in addition to the required templates I mentioned in the other thread.
Custom registration llink to stop spammers, support for Simple Menus and Simple Sidebars, so you can have different menus and/or sidebars on the BuddyPress pages, and showing whether the user is logged in or not.
I’ve attached an image of the Settings page for GC.
If you do try out the BP template pack, be aware it physically places files and folders in your child theme. They *must* be removed before you use GenesisConnect, becasue they will override the plugin. ************* End of quote
In my case,support at StudioPress believes that a re-install may not be required.
`http://www.studiopress.com/support/showthread.php?t=89578&highlight=forum%3A+genesis+connect`
Thanks for your further review. I’ll appreciate any further thoughts you might offer.
Mike
http://leavittslegacy.com/forums/
Can anyone help? It’s clear to see there are no topics, but equally clear to see to the right the tags that spammers left…any thoughts?
Sometimes emails end up filed as spam or junk….
Some web-hosting providers might need you to install a wordpress plugin such as https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mail-from/ and/or https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/
wp-mail-smtp also has a useful debug feature and more settings…
Sometimes emails end up filed as spam or junk….
Some web-hosting providers might need you to install a wordpress plugin such as https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mail-from/ and/or https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/
wp-mail-smtp also has a useful debug feature and more settings…
I deleted the spam posts but the tags stayed…I don’t see how to delete them.
I also deleted the spam groups, and yet it still counts 28…
Seems like either the software or me is missing something to control this..
I had spammers create tags, now I can’t get rid of them…can’t find the way.
http://leavittslegacy.com
Thanks,
Thanks – I removed that from the htaccess file, fwiw. With Registration Options back on it still leads to a blank page. Not sure why this would suddenly happen when it was working fine. The site’s unusable w/out it, given the spam.
I was able to sign up successfully as “raytest”.
One thing I encountered on my first try is it would redirect me to die-spammers.com.
I’m guessing you have a snippet in your .htaccess that does this.
You’re welcome
Going through this extra step prevents spammers’ stuff, if any, from appearing in our activity streams since almost of all of them don’t change display names
Just deleted about 300 spam groups and their associated users and activity stream items. If any other admins have some cycles to clean up old activity stream spam, it’d be amazingly helpful.
It could be that the emails are being marked as spam, or are being throttled by your server when you try to email them.
If the emails were not picked up by spam or junk mail filters, then your webhosting may need an extra plugin.
See: BuddyPress isn’t sending out emails (eg. activation emails, email notifications) in https://codex.buddypress.org/troubleshooting/frequently-asked-questions/#register
and / or: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/ (which has a useful debug feature)
Some people are wanting the old my topics forum page. You can get at your past forum support topics via your profile activity page. First, change profile name field to something other than login name. Then use the activity filter drop down to select forum topics or forum replies. You will then see any future forum topics in your activity stream. Old topics will not be in the stream. This has been done to prevent spam.
If they were not picked up by your spam or junk mail filter then your webhosting may need an extra plugin.
See: BuddyPress isn’t sending out emails (eg. activation emails, email notifications) in https://codex.buddypress.org/troubleshooting/frequently-asked-questions/#register
and / or: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/ (which has a useful debug feature)
Hi! I’m running the latest version of BP on the latest version of WP, and I’m having several issues I can’t nail down.
1. Pagination on member pages doesn’t work – clicking on next or a page number doesn’t do anything.
2. We’d tried BP earlier, but we’re a super active site, we unistalled because our load time was severely affected – old BP folders in our old theme files have cemented themselves in my server, and won’t allow me to delete, move or even change the permissions for the old files, so I can’t get rid of them.
3. There’s no submit button on the status messages.
4. I was unable to use bbpress, it would initialize correctly, but most of the buttons didn’t work. Like pagination, clicking caused no action at all.
We’re not using the BP default theme, I modified a different theme.
We’re using WP Total Cache, along with CloudFlare, for optimization.
Other plugins – SmushIt, WPTouch, CubePoints + BP integration, Edit Flow, Google Analytics, Google sitemaps, Jetpack, Fast Secure Contact form (Contact Form 7 allowed 20-30 spam contacts per day), UExtend Comment, Mood Thingy, Sexy Bookmarks, Wang Guard and wp-Typography. I’ve turned them all off an on to see if there was a conflict, and the issues remain under any configuration.
We’ve been using WP for over a year, and everything worked fine pre-BP install. My members really want all the features you can give, so any help you can give me will be greatly appreciated!
Site addy: http://persephonemagazine.com
It’s not an easy fix. You need various plugins to block spam but as stated above people are earning pennies to sign up to blogs. Best defense is a strong offense. Do as much as you can. Spam is a fact of life when running social sites.
Install my BuddyPress verified plugin and you can easily manage your spam accounts. I’m adding a feature in the next update that will deactivate an account automatically if that account posts too much if they are too new.
Core BP committer Paul is adding askimet filtering to the activity stream. Everyone knows spam is an issue and it’s being dealt with as best it can.
I have tried everything A to Z to stop spam registration. They all work for a while, but as the site grows it is overwhelmed. I think David100351 is correct people fill out the registration and hand it to bot drones. If anyone has successfully got this under control for a big site let me know as it makes it more work than it is worth.
WordPress is brilliant with anti-spam but have not had the same results with Buddypress. I am thankful for all the work people have done with BuddyPress and know they will say it is an MU problem, but I just want to use BuddyPress without spending so much time fighting spam. Anyone else tried wangguard?
I’m using WHMCS Bridge which creates a new user when somebody signs up to WHMCS.
This is great, but because it uses the email as the signup name, which can easily be changed to whatever the user wants, the @name given is pretty much the email address (such as @userdomain-com).
This isn’t good as it is giving spammers a field day, being able to figure out so many email addresses on the site.
Is there a way to either use only the first X amount of characters in the user name or, better still, giving the user the option to change the @name, even if they can only do it one time.
Is this possible?
Thanks,
Joe
Hi @drwebstein
Try again WangGuard (https://buddypress.org/community/groups/wangguard/)
We have added several detection systems to WangGuard server.
Now blocks 99’99% splog
I am having the same problem and I tried to do a test registration today. I have checked the spam folder to see if I get any activation key, but no we don’t, just the account activation mail. I activated my account using the link in the email.I was redirected to the activation key page too. Copy pasting the key from the activation link does not work. I tried to play a trick, I logged in using the username and pwd I used during the registration and it worked. I could open my profile page and upload avatar and add friends without entering the activation key. I don’t know why this is happening, and this can be a turn off for people trying to register on the site and something should be done about this. Thanks in advance for any helpful tips!
Deleting user will remove all activity, marking user as spammer will hide activity.
