BuddyPress.org

“Many spammer IP addresses resolve to the country of Afghanistan. “

Ban their IPs at the server level. Less work for you, less processing for the system.

Just a little WARNING:

Do NOT use

“External Group Blogs” together with

“Group activity stream subscription”

They don’t like each other.

Your users will be spammed with dozens of Emails a couple times a day.

I think this is why the notifications plugin just picks up everything and the “external groups” fetches articles a couple times. Averytime stuff gets fetched, notifications for all the items (not just the new ones) gets sended out. So far my guess.

I wrote the plugin-creators about it. hopefully they find a solution.

BUT the plugins for themselves are GREAT!!! THX!

check out:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/removing-blog-posts-form-the-swa-widget#post-36775

but instead of component == ‘blogs’ change it to type == ‘new_member’

then change your theme activity/index.php to remove the select option ‘show new members’

I would also like to see this filter turned off if logged in as admin, so we could administer the the spammers better –

using the above example – add before the loop

if ( is_site_admin() )

return $activities;

“I still wonder why they are attacking buddypress”

Backlinks, that’s it.

“I am starting to realise that no matter what BP devs do the spammers always try new things “

and this is open source. the code is OPEN. That means whatever is put in to stop spam, the code is viewable by spammers who just rewrite their programs to get around it.

“the fight against spam is in our hands the users, it will also help us learn more about being better webmasters”

Yes! If you are setting up a site to host other people’s information, then you have a responsibility as a webmaster to maintain your site.

“would it not be possible to have certain customizable elements which each and every installation of WPMU/BP had to create whilst doing an install, e.g. the name of the pages and hooks that the sploggers exploit?”

They look for the default registration slug. You already have the ability to change it.

Again to the two guys being relentlessly spammed: post the domain names that you are having problems with and I will try to find out what’s going on.

^F^

zageek and Bbrian017 – what are the URLs of the websites that are getting spammed? I will take a look at them for you.

^F^

What recommendations are there for a captcha or a custom field creation that fits into the BP 1.2 registration process?

I have tried a few plugins but they don’t work in BP 1.2 and dont appear in the registration.

Yes, logging on and custom profiles etc are OK … but this open door approach DOES pass on a lot of janitorial work to site admins

It seems strange that there is no default to offer some basic kind of obstacle to registration in the blog registration process … it is like building a house with wide open doors.

Buddypress only adds layers on top of WPMU liabilities what with the attraction of Activity Directory and so on. It looks embarrassing to have it all advertised their by default.

Just a question, perhaps this should be on dev, but would it not be possible to have certain customizable elements which each and every installation of WPMU/BP had to create whilst doing an install, e.g. the name of the pages and hooks that the sploggers exploit?

Yes, they know which pages and what code to look for … but if this was having to be changed during each and every installation, would it not work to stop them?

Excuse my ignorance, we suffer sploggers but I have no idea what it is they are exploiting.

@Bbrian017 I feel for you, ma. I am scratching my head. On my prod site, in over 18 months (since pre-BP alpah no less) I have had maybe 9 or 10 spam accounts. While I have a bit more of an involved signup process (just a bunch of addl required fields) I don’t have anything else. Blog creation IS disabled, so maybe that help? Not sure.

Ieven had sCaptcha going for awhile btu took it down as folks had so much trouble reading the stupid characters.

Still thinking of what’s up in your case. Hang in there.

Did you try deleting wp-signup.php?

And have you made sure that all spam users have been ‘spammed’ so they cannot just simply add/open new spam users/blogs?

Seriously no one is having spam issues like I am?

13 accounts since my last post!

please any help here would be great

My spam issue is just not stopping and it’s driving me insane!!!!

Thanks for the tip mlovelock I have done what you said. Seems it has stopped some spam but 10 minute later it all starts again.

They must get error messages stating the register page doesn’t exist or something.

@Bbrian017 – the register ‘slug’ is the path to your register page. So the default is yourdomain.com/register – yours would now be yourdomain.com/randomcrazyslugger

Given that, you probably don’t want your register page to be ‘randomcrazyslugger’ so you might want to change it to something that makes a little more sense to your site / your users.

Alright I have added right after

define( ‘COOKIEPATH’, ‘/’ );

and right before

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

What is this suppose to do anyways? I’m not sure I understand how this stops spam.

So now my wp-config is like this,

define( ‘COOKIEPATH’, ‘/’ );

define( ‘BP_REGISTER_SLUG’, ‘randomcrazyslugger’ );

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

/** WordPress absolute path to the WordPress directory. */

Don’t add it below the “Stop Editing” line.

I added the line. as suggested.

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

define( ‘BP_REGISTER_SLUG’, ‘yourregisterslug’ );

/** WordPress absolute path to the WordPress directory. */

That’s what it looks like.

Andrea_r sorry I’m in three different threads right now I feel like your chasing me around haha!

So now what?

I sit here with a website that doesn’t allow registrations?

Something official from buddy press or WPMU needs to be written…

what do I do?

Yes, just add that to the config file. Don’t move any files or folders around.

There’s really no need to make unfounded accusations like that.