BuddyPress.org

@foxly-

This is a very nice summary of the problem. Thank you for providing the introduction to the various attack vectors spammers currently use.

I would argue, as you know, that WP / BP also needs to combat registration spam–even though it is the hardest issue to address. There area a number of BP.org members that are looking for a solution, however imperfect, that will noticeably reduce spam signups. If a person is infected with a small viral load, the resulting illness often will not be as severe as if they had received a large dose of invading organisms. The same can be said with website spam signups. Any reduction is better than none.

But, as this is your thread and I do not want to take your thread off topic (or have others do what I just did ), I will ask that we table that discussion for another thread at another time and focus in this thread on solutions to combating spam once a spam account has successfully registered.

Once again, this is a great start to the conversation.

While you’re preparing part 2 I’ll make the comment (probably unpopular) that too an extent this is an issue that BP, WP, Automatic must accept some responsibility for in that WP has always followed the course of making it as easy as possible for inexperienced people to set up a blog/blogs the principle of ‘Out Of The Box’ and ‘5 Minute Install’ all designed to promote the app/s to those users who otherwise might be put off, it’s a marketing ploy to ensure that the app gains widespread and popular use (that is being deliberately cynical to make a point) It is due to that that I say there is a duty of care that falls on the App not on the user or community. I know how to get down and dirty with htaccess files, to read logs, enable various methods to deal with an issue – as do many others here – but lets not forget most don’t! I would suggest that it’s time to pull together all the various approaches to dealing with spam in one clear stickied post, make the steps as clear as possible but emphasize that these steps are of paramount importance to follow (thinking about it that may already exist?) Until such time as Foxly or the dev team comes up with the core improvements.

For the record I have enabled most of the steps found in various threads here and elsewhere and also disabled sub blog registration and receive no more than around 6 -8 spam sign ups a day, which we can deal with quite quickly and effectively, I’m still slightly puzzled as to why some appear to have such ongoing issues though, very sympathetic but puzzled nonetheless.

You rock!

And this would specifically deal with spam from actual users who have managed to sign up and and now using the internal messaging system to spam, correct?

And not spam signups, spam blog. Just to clarify.

Hi r-a-y — would you be interested in posting your validation function code? (pastebin it perhaps?)

Just want to avoid reinventing the wheel. I also found a plugin in bpdev that appears to be doing this, as well, even down to adapting the existing WPMU recaptcha plugin, but it doesn’t seem to work / was never finished. I haven’t worked out just why yet, however.
http://bp-dev.org/download/

You active bpdev-core and then bpdev-nospam.

Okay, per IRC dev chat, let’s use this thread for discussions on ideas to combat registration spam and other types of spam.

Even more spam now, coming from this user: https://buddypress.org/community/members/joymab/

Initial reaction from Jeff & I is that you detail what you have in mind before you dash off in one direction etc

@foxly – Come into the #buddypress-dev irc room on Freenode and let the team know what you have in mind!

You can also use a java web version of IRC if you don’t have a client:
http://java.freenode.net/?channel=buddypress-dev

did you try
if( $bp->loggedin_user->id == '59' ){
just to see if it works without the get_option(‘bp_spammer_cp_bp’) bit?

you are missing an =, should be:
if( $bp->loggedin_user->id == get_option(‘bp_spammer_cp_bp’)){

xspringe,
There is someone doing a Google Summer of Code project which is working on a plugin for BP that will report objectionable content. I expect spam will be part of the objectionable content that can/will be reported with that plugin. You can support his efforts: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/bp-moderation/

Use the search before posting. There are literally dozens of threads about this common problem.

Thanks for the link. I’m going to try that if my current changes don’t work. I changed the register slug and added more required fields to the signup page. I’ll let you know if it works.

PS
Looking at that code it seems it still let admins send PMs. If that’s true could it also be changed to allow other “ranks” such as authors, subscribers, etc.?

Try this until a more, full-featured privacy component is available.

Remove send private message button for non-friends:
http://blog.etiviti.com/2010/03/buddypress-hack-remove-send-private-message-for-non-friends/

Got my second spam message as well. It seems to be affecting multiple BP installs so I think it should be a high priority to do something about it.

I’m getting these on my own site. These are spam bots and they found a way into BP. This should be a number one priority for BP. I’ve seen this stuff with phpbb and other CMS. It very easy for these people to bring down your site.

1.1.x (whatever it was) was great. I had an activity stream widget on the front page, so I could immediately see (well, once I’d deleted all the spam registrations) who’d been doing what and where, and I click to go and view the context and respond in the same place.

Now I get the feeling that BuddyPress is a platform for creating communities of BuddyPress users

Now there is no profile wire (I renamed it to ‘wall’ because nobody understood what a ‘wire’ is) – it was an absolutely fantastic way for me to greet new users and have a bit of open chat with them.

Now there is this @username nonsense which I don’t understand myself (I am not and never will be a twitter user) – where does that post go? It shows up as if it’s my (Facebook-style) status update. Someone can reply to it but I can’t reply to their reply. All continuity has been lost. I can see the advantage of AJAX replies in the activity stream, but not when it seems a random factor whether the post will appear only in the stream or whether it will appear at source..

The default theme is awful (1.1.x or whatever I had was beautiful, right out of the box) – It took me forever just to get the home page working with two widget columns (surely that wouldn’t have been hard to include in the release..?) but the profile page… ooooh no, it’s a disaster In 1.1.x I had no problems tweaking the profile page to make it do what I want… with 1.2 it defaults to the awful activity stream and I have to click through to profile on every user to see if he comes from xgGT54GRerju and works at Ox8iHghuf34 before I delete him as a spammer.

I started using BP because I needed to replace an ancient platform that I’d written myself ages ago, and I wanted something reliable and extensible because I just don’t have the free time to work on my site anymore. BP 1.1.x was exactly what I wanted (I tried Elgg and some other yucky, heaving nonsense before stumbling on the beautiful BP).

But now it’s just gone off on an utterly bizarre tangent and lost all its intuitive user- (and admin-)friendliness

I know it’s free and I know I’m moaning and not being productive but I really can’t write plugins or themes for BP (much as I would love to – I can’t even work out how to put the wire back) but I feel it’s very sad to see something so good (and so free) go so wrong

Yeah I just got two spam private messages in the last two days. Here is the latest one:

Please reply back with my email (anabel . awaza 01 @ yahoo . co . uk)
Dearest,
How are you over there?
I know that you would be excited for the fact that you do not know who is writing.
Actually my name is Mis. Anabel Awaza,Please my dear i will like us to hold a good long time relationship with real love.and I have something very important that I need to share with you. I am very serious; I shall tell you more about myself and send you my picture in my next mail.please reply back with my email address (anabel . awaza 01 @ yahoo . co . uk))
Hoping to hear from you soonest.
Yours Anabel.

View Spammer’s BuddyPress profile:
https://buddypress.org/community/members/anabel4you/