BuddyPress.org

To give you the entire picture of what happens when you register, or do anything else, go to Buddypress Test Drive. http://testbp.org.

Register, and you an experience everything it says and does for your site.

On the email subject, Buddypress email are actually wired around WordPress emails. In the very most likely case, the email is at a snails pace, and either ends up at the spam folder, or just takes along time to receive. This pace on which the emails get received will fluctuate, depending on the activity on the site. My emails on my site take a couple minutes to receive, Only because I am on my on server, there is nothing you can really do to speed up the emails, because you are on a host server, multiple servers. Emails taking 20-30 minutes is actually pretty good, compared to most, like on bluehost, which can take up to an hour and a half!

This one is useful:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/requests-feedback/forum/topic/here-come-the-spammers/

@hnla I know that there will be a segment of the population who will be prevented from joining because I am blocking IP addresses. But, I want/need these prevented in the first place and I do not understand why this is not addressed in the core and has to be something I must “hunt through the forum threads to reducing spam signups”. Its not like this is an unknown issue.

Besides, I HAVE searched for “reduce spambots” “reduce fake sign ups” “Reduce and reducing spam sign ups” with zero results.

You should take care adding bans on IP’s it’s a little frowned on and can affect legitimate users, Most spammers will be spoofing their addresses they don’t want to be tracked so adding these IPs is likely not really doing much.

There are plenty of tips and tricks if you hunt through the forum threads to reducing spam signups.

What I have to ask is “Why?” and “How?” are these spambots accessing and creating users? I have one site that uses WP multisite with BP and there’s a great plugin “BP Registration Options” that works well enough to grab and display all new member requests and displays IP addresses; which I then add to WP-Ban. Its taken a month but I am now down to a dozen or so spambot signups per day.

Now, I have another WP/BP site that is NOT multisite and “BP Registration Options” does not work the same. BUT I copy the IP addresses from the one and paste it into the “WP Ban” of this site. However, I am still 100+ spambot signups per day. So, I have a plugin “Pending Activations” (which doesn’t work in multisite) but this plugin does not display the IP address of the offending spambot signups. Thus, my battle with the signups continues …

So … How are the spambots signing up? Why does the registration form not have CAPTCHA? and how can we stop them from signing up?

Don’t doubt there isn’t one common string to latch onto you’ll probably have to run a few sorts, going to be agony whatever method one takes really, you could try .info that may take care of quite a few?

Sounds like time to get stuck into phpMyAdmin and use it’s search to try and locate just emails ending in .info or similar spammy email addies and delete the rows directly in the DB, might be some genuine ones but probably less than in WP backend which has no sort capability

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.