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Search Results for 'spam'

Viewing 25 results - 2,101 through 2,125 (of 2,714 total)
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  • #71633
    kidrob
    Participant
    #71558
    Hugo Ashmore
    Participant

    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.

    #71550
    motomac
    Participant

    I have the latest versions of WPMU and BP, but I have tonnes of spam.

    It’s a pity, there are not any antispam plugins for BP which work on the registration page.

    Anton
    Participant

    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?

    #71539
    arezki
    Participant

    r-a-y, FYI and for what it’s worth for others looking for a similar concept. There is a tiny plugin called “Invitation Code Checker.” By installing it and then putting a code in it, say ‘fifty three’, and changing “enter validation code” in the registration form to “what is fifty and three in letters” – seems to be working so far. Spams have slowed, though I expect they will catch up. By then it is a matter a matter of changing the code like what is the capital of china? In my case, it is a foreign language site, which I hope would add more difficulty to those punks.

    Thanks for the help!

    Boone Gorges
    Keymaster

    hnla – Would you mind checking to see whether the table wp_bp_invite_anyone exists in your database? The “sent invites” information comes from there.

    I didn’t know about the spammer issue!! I will have a look at it.

    Hugo Ashmore
    Participant

    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.

    #71456
    3sixty
    Participant

    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.

    #71391
    3sixty
    Participant

    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.

    #71352
    dre1080
    Member

    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

    #71211
    djsteve
    Participant

    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.

    #71137
    Gene53
    Participant

    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.

    #71125
    peterverkooijen
    Participant

    Are there any downsides to blocking proxy servers?

    #71077
    David Lewis
    Participant

    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.

    #71076
    David Lewis
    Participant

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

    #71068
    djsteve
    Participant

    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…

    #71066
    Hugo Ashmore
    Participant

    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

    #71065
    gregfielding
    Participant

    @kunal17

    I’m seeing the same thing you are….

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

    #71061
    Sam Steiner
    Participant

    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?

    #71054
    gregfielding
    Participant

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

    #70388
    brianterry10
    Member

    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?

    #70351
    djsteve
    Participant

    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.

    #70348
    snark
    Participant

    Still looking for help on this. My new BP site finally went live today — http://www.wordlab.com/ — and I’m getting a couple signups per hour that never click on the activation link. Some may be legit but can’t figure out the activation process, but from email correspondence I’ve only found one who fit that bill — the others never respond to me, so I’m guessing a fair percentage of them are spambots using fake email addresses.

    So it would be great to have these improved User sorting options in the WP Admin, so I could track down bogus registrations, perhaps those that haven’t been activated after a set amount of time, and delete those users in batches. An alternate strategy would be to have the system auto delete (or delete en masse on command) any registrations that are never confirmed after a set period (10 days, 30 days, etc.)

    #70320
    Anointed
    Participant

    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?

    #70315
    brianterry10
    Member

    I think this problem is connected with the mailing settings of my server. I’ll investigate this more.

Viewing 25 results - 2,101 through 2,125 (of 2,714 total)
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