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Search Results for 'spam'

Viewing 25 results - 2,251 through 2,275 (of 2,711 total)
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  • #65301
    Andrea Rennick
    Participant

    Go turn off the ability for users to add other users. If you already have spammers in your system, they’ll let others in. It’s under Site Admin -> Options.

    Doing the easy stuff is just the first level of defense.

    #65294
    bbrian017
    Participant

    Guys when you re write the slug do you have to also move folders or files?

    or do I simply add

    define( “BP_REGISTER_SLUG”, “random slug” );

    to the wp-config?

    #65292
    bbrian017
    Participant

    I simply did the easy things. I added yes or no questions. I put in default profile fields they would have to answer and I added a date of birth field.

    What I don’t understand is right now I have registrations closed and they are still signing up.

    Registration has been closed for almost an hour and I still got 8 or 9 spam accounts over the last 40 minutes.

    How is that possible?

    #65289
    bbrian017
    Participant

    I had to close registration the spam is so bad. I’m assuming the person that is spamming our websites is someone within the community here at buddy press.

    As soon as I made a rude comment about the developers ignoring spam issues I got hit by spam like never before.

    #65283
    Andrea Rennick
    Participant

    Bbrian – what exactly have you implemented to stop splogs? I’m not being sarcastic. If I know what you’re tried already, I can suggest different things other than telling you things you tried already.

    “I wonder where the spammers get the time to figure out ways to spam sites is there like a spam university or something”

    They buy automated scripts. Seriously, I can send links. They google for default text like “powered by buddypress” and “/register/”, plus they jointly build lists of BP-powered sites and share them, so they can then drop these lists of sites into their programs.

    Part of stopping them relies on figuring out how they come in, which we’ve spent time doing.

    #65279
    bbrian017
    Participant

    I had 110 e-mails this morning and over 60 spam accounts.

    Where am I supposed to find time for this?

    I looked at the bp demo site registration I don’t see much different besides the date of birth…

    http://testbp.org/register/

    #65274
    zageek
    Participant

    I wonder where the spammers get the time to figure out ways to spam sites is there like a spam university or something lol

    On my site I even disabled registrations and I still two splogs appear after that, which is very confusing for me indeed.

    I can see one problem with sharing info on this forum about fighting spam, and that is that it will give the spammers the info they need to come up with counter attacks. I propose we start a spam eater group where we can share spam info behind the scenes, in fact I am going to start it now, not a perfect solution but still one that could work. What do you guys think?

    https://buddypress.org/groups/spam-eater

    Its a private group but anyone is welcome to join.

    #65183
    Andrea Rennick
    Participant

    “Adding an extra feature on signup or even adding a question doesn’t help. “

    If you have just the defaults, you will get hammered with spam. No question.

    Part of the issue is how they are finding your site and how they are signing up. What works for one site may not work for another as there are quite a number of sploggers out there who wrote programs (I’ve seen them advertised) to hammer your sites. They look for the defaults.

    But in my experience, to stop the splogs to a trickle, you have to do a number of things, not just one or two. Andy has a number of fields on signup at testbp.org and doesn’t have a splog issue. The domain has been up long enough for them to find him.

    There are signup moderation plugins for MU. I have no idea if they work with BP, but someone can modify them. there are also a number of suggested bot-stopping plugins that are suggested, that I have found DO work, but many people reading about them discount it as they think it only applies to comments. Some sploggers use the exact same techniques. Bad Behavour works. Cookies for Comments works.

    #65174
    bbrian017
    Participant

    Adding an extra feature on signup or even adding a question doesn’t help.

    #65125
    stripedsquirrel
    Participant

    Hi Andrea. Yes, that 1st part is quite easy with BP :)

    the 2nd part is tougher though, as far as I know:

    “- the opportunity to manually approve/delete sign-ups based on their answer, at least blocking the unapproved from appearing in blog lists, sidewide activity etc, basically making it 100% private (only vsible for admins) until approved.”

    #65113
    zageek
    Participant

    You lucky, the spambots that are after me figure out the new slugs after a few days.

    I am actually considering setting up a botnet to jam up their IP’s and domains as payback lol

    #65112
    zageek
    Participant

    @Bbrian017 I actually do that by manually logging in once of twice a day, and marking users and blogs as spam at my discretion. If in doubt I email the person who signed up and ask them something a spammer wouldn’t know. My site is aimed at users in my country only so there are many things I can ask them that genuine users only would be able to answer. Its tough going.

    I think there must be someway to do this through WP though as you can do this with many other CMS’s and forum scripts where you can only allow registrations after approval

    #65108
    Andrea Rennick
    Participant

    “A nice feature would be (plugin request!) to have:

    – an extra field on signup. “

    Then add an extra required filed in the BO backend.

    #65085
    stripedsquirrel
    Participant

    I don’t think anybody can stop you from posting a file on your server with domains and IP’s which you advise to be blocked… I actually think it would be a good idea to have this info centralized, an Akismet for sign-ups if you please, would save a lot of effort.

    Just checked wp-ban’s stats and 4 IP’s were blocked over 1000 times. Though it does not stop splogs, it serves as a good example that sharing info might help, especially if the signup page can check a database of known sploggers or words in blog titles.

    A nice feature would be (plugin request!) to have:

    – an extra field on signup. Skip all the usless and annoying captcha’s, just a simple question: “why you want a blog?” or more specifically: “what are you going tor write about?”

    – the opportunity to manually approve/delete sign-ups based on their answer, at least blocking the unapproved from appearing in blog lists, sidewide activity etc, basically making it 100% private (only vsible for admins) until approved.

    Before you ask: I cannot make this, but I will be happy to test if some more skilled person can!

    #65077
    stripedsquirrel
    Participant

    Rewriting the slug works for me. @andy, would it be possible to have the slug name not in wp-config, but as an option under BP options? Or even as a required step when activating/installing BP? That way, everybody will create their own slug and all should be happier to use BP :)

    #65063
    mlovelock
    Participant

    I started the group for splogging and spam a while ago, but to be honest I haven’t experienced any for quite a while now.


    @andy
    ’s right about changing the signup slug, that made a big difference for me. I also renamed (removed) the wp-signup.php file as that’s not in use, and again that made a difference – though watch for that on a wpmu / wp upgrade as it’ll replace the file.

    I removed the WordPress references in my theme footer too, just to make it a little less obvious that I’m running WP.

    Also running SI-Captcha antispam and NoSpamNX, but that’s about it nowadays.

    #65059
    Jean-Pierre Michaud
    Participant

    what i read here is just childish… what kind of site do you run? from what i see on your site and twitter profile, you are a SEO marketer?…

    you start a site for bloggers, what do you think you will do with it… grab spammers. this is the only goal on a site with open registration and off-topics.

    i had hundreds of incompetent clients in the past, who thought they were gods and they knew everything and were able to fix everything they were touching… they were also whinners and drama queens. complaining about spam?… sure you can put the fault on the guys here, but that just show that you know nothing about spam, not a single bit.

    a good captcha is not useful if the spammer is a human paid by a company to post adverts… a good filtering engine is not good either when the spammers use trolling techniques to post psychadelic messages…

    it is the job of the site admin to filter by hand, to approve the content, to find great topics for a site, or simply to not use the boring “off-topic” market that is so profitable… like you just did to raise your seo rank.

    you’Re simply not good at seo… leave.

    #65055
    Windhamdavid
    Participant

    Any of you who continue this thread any further are simply staring the ‘gift horse in the mouth’ so to speak.

    ~ spam in a problem for every company, be it IBM, Google or WordPress. These companies spend millions combatting it and it’s a problem for almost any CMS, or site that has UGC. If you can’t install Askimet, and/or a couple other preventative measures on your site, then you should hire someone who knows what their doing or you have a compromised(hacked) site where once again, you should hire someone who knows what they’re doing.

    while not naming names ~ I have watched ‘your’ post on this forum and you’ve offered very little contribution and quite a bit of negativity. That doesn’t bode well for an open source community who provides you a product free of charge. Perhaps providing some meaningful feedback about your experiences will help the community develop better solutions instead of glaring accusations and harsh criticism? In fact your post in this community are very much like spam for the very same reason. At this point, you’ve pretty much hit an all time low since your accusing developers, many of whom work for free, of turning a blind eye towards the issue of spam. If you’re unhappy with website, may i suggest move on to another piece of software that is magically immune to spam robots, where you’ll most positively be a great asset, not only to them, but also with your absence here on the Buddypress Forums.

    #65054
    MrMaz
    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?”

    But if humans are filling out the forms, you are pretty much SOL.

    #65048
    abcde666
    Participant
    #65030
    bbrian017
    Participant

    zageek how do I make it so all the accounts at my site have to be manually approved?

    What section of the admin cp is that in?

    #65020
    Xevo
    Participant

    Are stwc’s solutions not enough?

    #65019
    rich! @ etiviti
    Participant

    IMHO – being overcritical will not solicit the best help. Like any community – you’ll need to fight spam regardless of the platform and requires ongoing patience to battle.

    Some tricks I use

    block all MSIE456 users, block bad bots, block known spammer country CDIR ranges, rename template pages, try whatever plug-in and tweak if needed.

    #65013
    zageek
    Participant

    I agree with you totally I also highlighted this issue in this thread:

    https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/spam-domains-to-add-to-your-block-list

    Not to sound rude but it feels like if the developers or the main people aren’t too affected by an issue then its not regarded as an issue.

    SPAM is major problem and while a test site might work fine if you have niche sites around certain topics you might get more spam than others based upon the fact that spammers might come across your site through keywords specific to your site and as such the devs might not neccisarily experience such problems.

    I have tried everything some spambots even seem to get around CAPTCHAs, the only option I have is to manually approve each new user.

    #64852
    zageek
    Participant

    Thats true, it just seems that some users seem to run into odd little problems that the devs may or may not get because they may not have users on their test sites interacting with the site in the same way.

    But with time I am sure everything will be ironed out.

Viewing 25 results - 2,251 through 2,275 (of 2,711 total)
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