BuddyPress.org

@mike: Even with just a small site. I was running it on first with a VPS hosted site and it got shut down by the provider. They say that the “huge” amount of mail coming from BP notifications are “spam” and a violation of their TOS since, they say, it got the IP blacklisted.

I moved it to a dedicated server but I’m concerned that the IP address will be blacklisted if the system sends out hundreds of mail notifications in an hour. Problem is, I don’t know how much mail is too much. And if that should qualify as spamming. Should this be a concern?

Was just wondering if there’s a way for the admin to set email notifications off by default. Or if not, if there’s a code we can edit to do that. Feedback would be great.

Your Bp email server might become an open relay server for spammers !

Raise a ticket. This is a usability/privacy issue. It should be blatantly obvious to the user who is replying to a private message that they are sending to more than the sender.

My guess is you are not quite understanding the way private messaging was intended to work. As the name implies, it is a private message. When you send a “private” message to 40 friends, it’s not quite “private” anymore, by some definitions. The same occurs in email when one of your 40 recipients hits “reply all” assuming they were not bcc’d.

As such, when you send a bp message to 40 people, you are, in a sense, establishing a 40 person thread. That’s the way it’s supposed to work (which is great for smaller numbers) In other words, expect 40 replies to the thread and all 40 will get 40 messages. Seems ripe for trouble when you send it to 40! (btw, I am impressed you were able to have the patience to pull off 40 as you had to remember and type 40 names or usernames since this is the only way to do it in BP at the moment.

Second, if you send a message that, upon reply, many members will deem the response as “spam” consider not starting the thread. Just remember, BP messaging was not meant to be like email.

If you want to hire someone to implement a captcha on the compose message page, please post in this group -> https://buddypress.org/groups/buddypress-job-board

I guess Jeffs Privacy-Plugin would help:

http://jeffsayre.com/2009/12/05/buddypress-privacy-component-released/

Too bad this plugin will not make it into BP 1.2 core !

If you really really wanted to, look in wp_signups. They don’t get cleaned out on delete (partly to prevent deleted spammers from signing up again with the same info).

Bare in mind you’ll encourage spammers by doing this.

Hey Brajesh,

I just checked out the auto-activate plugin and I can confirm what Pierre said that it does send an activation email even though the user account is already activated.

Also, I just checked out buddydev.com since you have the plugin running on your site and I’ve noticed a lot of spam registrations there!

Perhaps you need to add some anti-spam prevention of some kind to your BP install.

And also, as a courtesy, on the plugin release page, you should add a warning to enable some type of anti-spam solution on the user’s BP install (particularly in production environments).

Nice, Brajesh!

Have you updated your auto-activate plugin lately?

In your comments, you mention you were going to update the plugin in November, but the last update was in October.

Also, has using this plugin affected spam registrations for you, Brajesh?

Also see http://www.bp-tricks.com/tips_and_tricks/stopping-the-sploggers/

You could also try blocking the email domain in Site Admin > Options

Yes, no spam in this category please!

yeah, but why do you spam this page ?

dfa327 (?) posted this on a splog fighting group wire:

I’ve upgraded my entire site. So far no bad guys:)

I’m up to buddypress 1.1.3 and wpmu 2.8.6.

I got the following plugins to stop spam:

http://wordpress-plugins.feifei.us/hashcash/

http://www.poradnik-webmastera.com/projekty/invisible_defender/

http://www.svenkubiak.de/nospamnx-en

And a few other things to stop it, but I think those are working well above.

Prior to the above I was getting hit by the minute!!!! Now none:)

Haven’t tested them yet. Can’t vouch for them.

I have buddypress 1.1 installed and it seems to work perfectly except for spammers or sploggers or whatever..

I downloaded WPMU-Signup-Captcha from WPMUDev and put the 3 files in the directories, just like you said.

I don’t see it in the plugins section of the admin, and I still don’t have any captcha applied to new registrations.

A post has been deleted from this thread as it was little more than spam/advertising.

Without being able to look and see multiple files both within the wordpress part and the server, the most we can do is guess.

Some things I have seen crank the CPU:

– a bad plugin with an off query

– bad code in the theme (make the theme more efficient, revert to default theme to see if that’s the issue)

– inappropriate server settings. Did you really put in a wildcard subdomain (if you use them) or do you have, say 20, listed. (Seen it. Wasn’t pretty.)

– default server settings on high traffic sites. Preforks, child processes – all these can be streamlined.

– an obscure bug with cPanel on CentOS boxes that create a memory leak

– in rare cases a hardware failure

and finally – being hit with spammers constantly. I have a couple older domains, and no matter where I host them, the simple fact they are “out there” mean they get hit with an INSANE amount of spam. Email, comments, splogs – all of it.

Basically, you have to eliminate what it isn’t.

how much traffic do you get? How big is the database?