BuddyPress.org

Now… my spambusher script gives me some very rudimentary statistics… and in the 2 days and 9 hours since that post above, the number of spam registrations has gone up 50%… but the number that I actually delete myself has gone down by about the same number

Which tells me two things:

1. People or bots are actually following the link above and tripping the spambush

2. Links to buddypress sites from buddypress.org are just ASKING to be spammed

There’s a fairly simple and foolproof method to automate spammer deletion. It’s easier to let them in and then delete them automatically than to try to stop them from registering in the first place. Otherwise it becomes an ‘arms race’ type of thing, as well as a game of keep-up-with-BP/WPMU-changes if you try to integrate it.

See it in action at http://visarus.co.uk/bp-spambusher.php – every time you visit that page you will be cleaning up spam registrations for me I can put it on CRON if I want but I enjoy the satisfaction of seeing how many registrations I’ve deleted 40 in the last 24 hours.

Spammers target all social networks. They literally overran an elgg site I have and I’m rebuilding with WP/BP. A few still get through with the latest BP and anti-spam and custom profile fields, not a lot, two or three a day, but that’s nothing. I found about 600 in my first month in my users that never made it to the surface. As for the few that did, having a couple fill in custom profile fields is really helpful. The bots that do sneak through fill those two spots with gibberish, in my case age and location, so it’s easy to identify spam members.

check if your activation e-mail lands in the SPAM-folder of the recipient.
I am not sure why, but most of the time the e-mail with the activation-key is landing in the SPAM-folder…..

@zlamczyk: I think we are trying to work on the same thing.
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/disable-activation-email/

I am getting spammed (bad) and they are simply using the activation email to approve themselves. My thought was just do a manual approval to either “activate”, “send activation email” or “delete from wp-signup”.

I have modified manual member approve for BuddyPress so I can see the signup table and manually approve members.
http://mattkern.com/wpmu-manually-approve-new-members-on-local-install/

I just need to stop the automatic sending of the activation email. Do you know how?

I’ve simply tried commenting out the following line in wp-core-signup.php to test, but it’s not working.
wp_mail( $to, $subject, $message, $message_headers );

This is the function; but for some reason the activation email still goes out.

@hnla and @boonebgorges: I found this plugin a while back and modified it to work with BuddyPress. Let me know if you need it still.

Anyone know how to stop sending the activation email? I don’t want to disable the activation function; I just want to stop sending the email automatically. I want to selectively send it. I figure I would just add this function to the manual approve plugin so I could either:
Manually Approve
Manually Send Activation Email
Delete the Signup

I’m getting killed with spam users (that are easily identifiable)
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/spam-blogs/

Actually… Terry is correct. SPAMers are in fact hiring people from India to fill our registration forms and CAPTCHA’s by hand. They get paid next to nothing and just sit there for hours and hours a day filling out CAPTCHA’s. I’m sure the majority of SPAM comes from Bots… but it’s not all bots. And there is no way to stop a human short of banning entire countries.

Also; each “blast” of spam users/blogs appear to come from different IPs, but the username always has a 7 digit number pattern after a random name. They all appear to come from “.info” email registrations.

These registrations are bypassing the public registration form requirements somehow, but I believe they are legitimately activating their account (since I’ve had delays after disabling the registration form). There are entries in both _users and _signups tables that match.

Hope this helps if anyone else is having this issue. I’m open to any temporary solutions for this particular pattern, but more importantly is there a good way to solve this long term?

Is there a way to manually approve members? Maybe some step in between that would allow a manual send of the account activation email?

Update: After several days of manually adding users with a form (that matches the registration form); I attempted to re-enabled registrations. Immediately I got 2 new spam users and blogs.

New User: terrence1603615
Remote IP: 65.75.250.92
terrence1603615@LIEMAIL.INFO

New User: cooper7790557
Remote IP: 65.75.250.92
cooper7790557@THEINBOX.INFO

This is only happening on one of my installs (http://anglersites.com). Running WPMU 2.9.2/BP 1.2.2.1. My other install (http://fellowmoms.com) is running WPMU 2.9.2/BP 1.2.3 and is not having this issue.

Any reason to think BP update would resolve this? Looks like current version is 1.2.4.1.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Looks like disabling the registrations stops it; from my previous post these were delayed notices. As soon as I disabled registrations again, I recieved a flurry of “Password Lost/Changed” for a couple users (one of them was an active user that was not newly created). I marked this user as spam.

Surely someone else is getting hit?

I have a couple BuddyPress installs. The older of the 2 has received 150+ spam member registrations (and blogs) this weekend. All create members like bob45873675 and “Bob’s Blog”.

I have changed slugs, activated recaptcha and followed several blog posts on best practices. What’s interesting is they are somehow bypassing my registration page. I have required fields and have removed the “create a blog” from the registration page; but somehow they manage to create an account and a blog. I also receive “lost password reset” email notices for each account that is created, so maybe that’s a clue to where the issue is.

I was so fed up with it, I disabled registrations completely (only allowing blog creation by logged in users) — and I’m still getting new spam members and blogs (how is that possible??) This seems to be a pretty serious security issue that is different from previous “splogging”…

Vulnerability/hack in the registration or lost password, etc…?? I presume this could be WPMU not necessarily BP?

I am also having this problem – I guess everybody is. I also followed the tips you mentioned and initially, it reduced splogger registrations a lot.

However, I disagree with Terry: there are not real people setting up blogs and answering captchas, these are bots. As kiwipearls mentioned, if you go and try to sign up manually, you have to fill in the required fields.

There is a leak somewhere in BuddyPress/WPMU registration and all methods to stop the oil have failed until now. BP (haha) people say it’s WPMU and the other way around, I guess. The leak has been here for months and nobody seems to want to fix it. Maybe it’s some kind of corruption since the premium site Terry mentioned has a way to fix it.

@kiwipearls the only product I’ve fond effective (about 95%) is the antl-splogging @ http://wpmudev.org – it’s a premium membership site on he expensive side, but it’s working for me. (btw ~ i’ve used all the methods you listed above) – my thinking is that sploggers are hiring people to setup their blogs and answer captchas…