I’ve decided to manually register users as they sign up. It is the kludgiest of solutions, but I’d rather spend my time registering good folks that hours seeking out and deleting bad.
Hello BuddyPress Community.
I have a Multi-Site BuddyPress site set up and working great, but we’ve begun to have a real problem with spammer/splogger registrations being created and immediately sending spam out to our users. Some users have recently threatened to abandon the site because they feel like the volume of spam has gotten to the point where it’s too much of an inconvenience to deal with.
I’ve searched the forums and investigated some of the different plugin options, but I feel like there’s no definitive solution. It seems that the best reports are that a number of modifications or plugins resulted in a reduced volume of spam, but I’ve seen very few reports from people who found the perfect combination of methods to eliminate the problem completely.
Has anybody out there had experience totally eradicating the spammer/splogger problem?
The suggested plugins seem to fall into a number of categories:
CAPTCHA options:
– BuddyPress reCAPTCHA plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-recaptcha/
– SweetCaptcha – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/sweetcaptcha-revolutionary-free-captcha-service/
New user registration moderation options:
– BuddyPress Registration Options plugin – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-registration-options/
Other options:
– WangGuard – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/wangguard/
– Ban Hammer – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/ban-hammer/
– Anti-Splog – http://buddypress.org/community/groups/anti-splog/
I’d love to hear about your experience dealing with this issue, including any recommendations that you believe are worth trying. Thank you very much.
Adam
I keep getting bogus accounts created on my site that are spamming my site. I installed the SI Captcha Options plug in thinking that would do the trick but its still going on. What can I do to stop this?
@fswd
Bad Hammer looks better. I’ll delete the Block by Maths and use that as it gives a list of who is spammer etc and who isn’t. As you say, it’s also been tested.
@fswd
The ‘Block Spam by maths’ seems to be doing the trick in stopping the robot members. I haven’t had any since I activated it last night, I’ve had legitimate members joining which shows it still allows humans to join. But I’m still cautious about widgets that show a ‘not tested’ warning, so I would be very interested in knowing if the one you are testing works out ok.
@paul Gibbs Thanks for reassuring me that I don’t have to keep changing browsers.
I just have to solve the problem of why I can’t have 3 columns back on my site instead of the two, it looks awful. Any suggestion as to where I post a troubleshoot question for this little problem. Take a look and you’ll see what I mean. http://clandestinecakeclub.co.uk/
@Lynn I’m going to quickly check out this spam blocker plugin now:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/ban-hammer/
Will let you know how it goes.
@Lynn We have used Block Spam by Math plugin on several sites now for well over a year with no issue so far. Give it a spin and see!!
@Lynn,
I had major issues recently and isolated the offending plugin to ‘bp registration options’. See this for more info: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/any-one-using-buddypress-please-help
We use ‘Block Spam by Math’ which seems to have cut down on robot reg’s quite a bit.
Get it here: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/block-spam-by-math-reloaded/
Hope that helps?
Since upgrading I can no longer delete members from the front end (when im logged in as admin).
When I click on delete member i get white screen and the member is not deleted.
This is an issue because we get about 3 spam sign ups every day at the moment 
Is there a plugin or some way to change the way the email is shown on the member profile page? I created an email field and it shows as-is…and I don’t want to have their email addresses on my site as-is because of spambots.
This SOB Gmail is spamming the verification emails. Thank you, aces. What a simple thing I forgot to look at.
If you have never received an email (and it’s not stuck in a spam or junk folder) then your web host may need an extra plugin to use email with WordPress.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/ ( http://www.callum-macdonald.com/code/wp-mail-smtp/ ) adds extra email settings to wordpress and has a tool to debug smtp / php mail. This plugin has previously been discussed: https://buddypress.org/?s=wp-mail-smtp ….
Alternatively the codex has another suggestion.
Try deleting user from admin and sign up again. They could also be getting the confirm email in their spam folder.
Where is this super admin everyone is talking about, hey r-a-y or anyone at this point, I’ll give you acces to my site to looking into?
BP 1.2.x has a bug where bp_core_is_user_spammer() is not returned as a boolean, but as an integer. This causes some problems with spammer checks.
For example, if a super admin is on a person’s profile who did not activate their account via email, in the BuddyBar, that person would be incorrectly cast as a spammer.
Haven’t checked this in BP 1.5, but it’s definitely worth looking into.
Can someone try to register on my site http://kanawey.com to understatd what I’m talking about? I’ve been traying to solve this problem for ove 6 days, going to diferent forums and I just don’t know what alse to do.
Please, Thank you
Thank you,
I contact my host, bluehost and they told me that my registration forrm and email confirmation also works fine. But I just created another test user and not received any e-mail.
should I ad this WP-Mail- SMTP plogin as well?
You should start a new topic!
Some web hosts require extra configuration to work with wordpress email.
wp-mail-smtp also provides a testing mode to help debug php and smtp mail.
Previous discussions about it can be found by searching buddypress.org for WP-Mail-SMTP
Hello Paul Gibbs,
I just created a test user and not received any e-mail.
I also check on my Dashboard under All users, and I have members that didn’t received any e-mails as well
one have ideas why this is happening.
I also check for any plugin anti spammer that I don’t know about, and can’t find anything?
any ideas?
This doesn’t happen automatically. Someone is clicking a button, or you’ve got a plugin that’s doing this for you
Does anybody know why these users are being tagged as spammers when they aren’t. This has happened to 3 out of 5 of the latest sign ups on my site, and it is seriously causing a barrier to joining my site.
What are they going wrong that this would happen?
Thanks.
Is there a way of assign users to help moderate the ACTIVITY FEED without giving them full admin? It’s the only place I see a big problem. What happens when I (the only admin) go to sleep. Someone could post 100 porn images or spam the feed endlessly with some sort of script or macro. I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it until I woke up. Also, I don’t like the idea of giving someone full access to everything. They could get hacked and we would lose everything.
