BuddyPress.org

Hello to everyone following this thread. I just released version 0.4 of my Invite Anyone plugin, which, as promised, adds the invite-by-email feature.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invite-anyone/

Here’s what’s new:

– “Send Invites” tab added to the Profile section

– “Send Invites” has two subsections: Invite New Members and Sent Invites

– On Invite New Members, users can enter email addresses, a custom invitation message, and check off some groups that the invited member will receive invitations to when they join the site

– On Sent Invites, users can see all the invitations they have sent, as well as whether or not the member has accepted yet

– When a user accepts an invitation, they receive invitations to all groups to which inviter(s) have invited them, as well as a friendship request from each individual who sent an invitation

– A link is added to group Send Invites pages that goes to the profile Send Invites page and pre-checks the group’s box

– There’s a Dashboard panel for sitewide admins that allows them to control some of the default behavior of the Send Invites page, as well as the visibility of the Send Invites tab. You can create a blacklist of users who are not allowed to send email invitations (good if you have spammers in your community!), limit by blog role, or by length of time since joining the site.

It’s been fairly thoroughly tested, but it’s possible (likely even!) that there are still annoying bugs. Please let me know if you find issues or have suggestions.

Hmm… check this out: http://www.642weather.com/weather/scripts-wordpress-captcha.php

I said I’d try and establish some test conditions to try and determine whether banned email domains were an issue in WP or BP, tests were not hugely conclusive sadly.

site running out of the box no modifications (WPMU / BP) – no anti spam measures in place. had been receiving ~ 10 -20 spam registrations daily (quantity of spam is governed to some extent by search engine ranking /prominence)

1/ Running WPMU 2.9.2 ALL BP plugins deactivated site open to user account registrations only.

24 hour period = no spam registrations at all – a surprising result!

2/ Conditions as above (1) but allowing blog to be registered

Start to receive spam signups – not many but only observed over a 6 hour period.

These do not match to any banned emails domains entered by me, so on the surface looks as though banned domains working BUT this is far from conclusive as they may simply not have attempted to.

3/ Activate BP 1.2.3 allow accounts and blogs to be registered.

Spam increases – not hugely though! of the 6- 8 received in a 12 hour period one is noted as having an email domain that matches to one entered in the banned domains list.

None of the above is that conclusive or useful sadly, it’s a difficult subject to run tests on. It does appear that BP probably does have some problem with the banned domain list, but then I get the impression that with each version 1.2.2.1 / 1.2.3 spam issues feel as though they are lessening but others may not be experiencing that.

One problem I noticed

On the invite email that gets sent out this is the link, http://yourbpsite.com/register/accept-invitation/test%40test.com

I’m now using a different register page to prevent spam. If I change $accept_link in invite-anyone/invite-anyone/by-email.php to reflect my register page, will it break the plugin?

Great stuff!

Installed ‘bleeding’ on live test site running BP 1.2.3 / WPMU 2.9.2

Installed smoothly – previous version didn’t exist fresh install (production site has older version )

Things noted:

The group send invite that was part of the original plugin function allows to select from all members including members marked as spammers! (am logged in and working as admin)

Having sent email invite from my account I’m returned to a ‘Sent invites’ (‘You have sent invitations to the following people.’) but there is no data available.

No email has been received, but tested setting up new account and that hasn’t been emailed either so think this is a BP 1.2.3 issue as all was working earlier today *sigh*

Looking pretty good though.

15 hours since Hashcash 4.5.1 was installed and still no new splogs registered. This compares with about 40 splogs over the preceding 3 days.

The plugin wordpress Hashcash (updated today to 4.5.1) should now work for BuddyPress registration but it stops EVERYBODY from registering.

This is not true for me. I just registered a test user with Hashcash 4.5.1 installed. Though still waiting to see if it stops BP splog spammers.

whats the status on this? would also like to find a way for an ignore user or report this/mark as spam in my activity stream

I added captcha – and I still get multiple signups from the same dozen or so email-domains, even though they are already in my blacklist..

I am checking on another hunch today… I think there is a possibility that maybe having the same entry twice in the blocked domains could be causing an issue with it not working – that seemed to make it fail once before… I just pasted the domains I had banned into a spreadsheet and then sorted it alpha – and I had the same domain listed several times in several instances… now to clean it up and try it again.. I now have 437 banned domains in my list.. maybe there is an issue there?

Maybe these qualifiers should be added to the trac for fixing? on buddypress and maybe mu?

I will read the spam spam spam thread and see if there is anything else I can do as well.

The best trick I learned for fighting spam bots is to ask a question that only a human can answer and making them type it into a text box. If you change the question daily or randomize it, it makes it even tougher. Don’t do anything like math or captcha or something that a bot can calculate or decipher. Ask a question like “What color is snow?” or “How many sides does a triangle have?”

+1 for that idea, I had this on 2 SMF forums and it does work. While it doesn’t stop the odd human Spammer from registering, it stops bots dead in their tracks.

Maybe a coder would consider making such a BP plugin.

Are there any downsides to blocking proxy servers?

There are multiple entry points for SPAM bots… so any one measure probably won’t accomplish much. I posted a list of everything I did in the “Spam, Spam and more Spam” thread. Worse case… you could try captcha.

@Magganpice: I’ve had two SPAM registrations since banning proxy connections.

This has been a wordpress mu issue for a while off and on.. I discussed an idea about at mu forums:

https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/13982

[blockquote]

I too have noticed that even putting domains in the block list seems to not stop future registrations. Here is a thought of mine.

MAYBE a spammer actually signs up 100 new accounts, and then only activates one a day. So even though we have added his domain to the ban list for signups, he still has 99 more that have been signed up, but not yet activated?

If this is the case I would like to see MU add core code that checks to see upon activation if the domain they originally used to signup has since been banned, and then prevent them from activating if it has.

Just a thought, not sure if this is the case – but it may be worth looking into.

[/blockquote]

It was suggested that I add this suggestion to the trac, ( https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ )

but I really don’t know how to use that thing…

not sure that it is a buddypress specific issues, but I DO believe that the spammers are looking for buddypress phrases when compiling their lists of sites to hit…

But there are many steps one can initiate to stem that tide of spammers, although the domain blacklist is an issue in not apparently working I have still had reasonable success in reducing spam signups to around a dozen a day and still have one or two steps that I haven’t taken yet

@kunal17

I’m seeing the same thing you are….

Is there any way to get buddypress registration to reference the banned domain list?

I’m having 300 spam registrations a day and having to mark them all as spam manually 15 in one go in the user list. The plugin wordpress Hashcash (updated today to 4.5.1) should now work for BuddyPress registration but it stops EVERYBODY from registering.

David Lewis, one week later, is your solution still working for you?

I can’t experiment either and am getting 10+ spam signups an hour. yikes.

I totally agree with this. It’s quite confusing. I think more than a rewording of the text is needed.

Perhaps you can give people a series of simple steps they should go through to complete setting up their membership?

Step 1: Activate your membership

You give them instructions to visit their email account then click on the activation link in the email.

When they click on the activation link they’re taken to the next step page…

Step 2: Customize your avatar

They do this then press the button to complete, then they’re taken to the final step…

Step 3: They’re then directed to the activity page, at the top of this page could be a message to tell them their account is now active and they can start posting.

This 3 step process gives people a clear path to follow taking them to the page where they can then see what’s going on and begin taking part.

Each step page is nice and simple.

What do you think?

I have similar issues, and I have been pondering possible reasons this occurs.

I take the time to copy domain names that spammers com from, and add them to the mu-options as domains that are not allowed to create an account. I find that even after doing this, sometimes I get several more members with those email addys.. sometimes not.. the past week has seen a lot.

There was a time a few months ago when it was a known bug for this, but I am guessing it’s been fixed in mu by now – (I’m using 2.92 I think).

This is what I am thinking MAY be happening, and I’d love a way to update MU to close this loophole, if indeed it exists.

I am thinking that the spammers actually created a dozen or more accounts, and only activated one at a time. I am thinking that perhaps by the time I add the bad domain to the list of no-signups-allowed, they have already created several others – and simply activate them later.

If this is true, I would love for MU / Buddypress to do a check, when a member actually does this activation, and tell them sorry – the email domain is now on the bad list, and they can not activate.

Not sure if this is true, just a thought.

I’ve run into a similar problem but it’s not related to the emails not going through.

In testing, I have found that almost without exception, that no one pays attention to the text above the crop avatar to check their email for the validation.

The system takes the user to the crop avatar portion, which they do, but after submitting their new avatar, they are left on the same screen, with just a small text warning above the avatar to activate their account.

Actually, it even caught me off guard a few times, not realizing I needed to activate a new account.

Maybe in the future make this much more obvious?