BuddyPress.org

I was having 5 or 6 sploggers sign up daily no matter what I did until about 2 weeks ago when I revamped my tactics. Since then, I have had 0 spam signups… not one. Fingers crossed Here’s what I’ve done:

– Removed references to WP/BP in footer text
– Changed the register slug to something unrecognizable that has no bearing whatsoever to the concept of signing up (so even those grossly underpaid 3rd-world human spammers can’t figure it out)
– Installed WPMU Super Captcha to let the nice humans through: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/super-capcha/
– Installed WP-Ban to block the not-so-nice ones: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ban/
– Installed Buddypress Humanity as a double-check: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-humanity/
– Blocked lists of bad bots in .htaccess as suggested in this post: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/buddypress-spam/?topic_page=2&num=15#post-60177
– Added “deny from all” in .htaccess for wp-config.php
– If someone does manage to access the register page through a direct url (without visiting any other page first), they are bumped to a GOAWAY page with the following in .htaccess. .

# BEGIN ANTISPAMBLOG REGISTRATION
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-signup.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.examplesite.com. [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) http://examplesite.com/goaway.html [R=301,L]

So far, so good. As I mentioned, not a single splogger has managed to get through in about 2 weeks. If they do, there are 2 ingredients in the above recipe that can be adjusted:
– the captcha image is fully customizable to render bot algorithms redundant (hopefully)
– the register slug can be changed as often as you change socks

On a final note, there are also some interesting tweaks to be found here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/01/10-useful-wordpress-security-tweaks/

I’m having the same issue, did anyone find a solution ?

I had the same issue running XAMPP on Windows 7 Prof and fixed it by adding the sub directory where my wordpress was located to the RewriteBase in the .htaccess file

In my example I installed wordpress in a subdirectory called wp1
To update .htaccess

1. Open .htaccess file
2. modify RewriteBase / to RewriteBase /wp1

You need to enable WP Multisite. This link should help: http://wptheming.com/2010/03/wordpress-3-0-enable-network/

Have you changed your permalinks to something else?
https://codex.wordpress.org/Settings_Permalinks_SubPanel

Set it to anything but the default.

First, you have to change all references to the strings you want to localize so your POT file knows where to reference them.
Then, you need to create a POT file.

Here’s a quick guide I found on Google using poEdit:
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2007/08/27/localizing-a-wordpress-plugin-using-poedit/

There are others of course!

If you have any Qs, reply back.

@rogercoathup
Especially when multisite is installed, I always recommend that people test their WordPress thoroughly; do custom permalinks work, can you comment, can you register new sites, and so on. Usually it’s a permalink or mod_rewrite

si-captcha doesn’t work on my sites. I’m using https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/ and it seems to stop some of them. Still not a spam free solution.

You mean like these?
Categories: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_dropdown_categories
Tags: http://wphacks.com/how-to-display-wordpress-tags-dropdown-menu/

Does it work if you switch to the bp-default theme?
If so, the fault is in your theme. Give that a try, then provide more info on the error message.. can you register and login ok on your machine?

i am having a similar problem on my site,
http://www.cloudcandle.net

it is a fresh install testing site,
buddypress version 1.2.5.2
wordpress version 3.0.1

i can create users in the admin panel,
but when someone tries (me, my friend, my other friend) to register from the front end, the situation ends on a blank screen, and no confirm/register email gets sent out.
their profile gets added to the users visible on the back end, but does not appear in the users on the front end list.
and they cannot login.

the “allow anyone to register” option IS selected.
i have the admin bar visible to logged out users.
and i have tried with and without askimet enabled.

?

You need to make sure “Anyone Can Register” is checked off under Membership in the General WordPress Settings

You install the buddypress plugin from with in wordpress admin as buddypress needs wordpress 3.0 to work and add other buddypress plugins the same way.

Ah hah, nicework @tryggvib! Depending on how (well-) written the WordPress plugin is, sometimes you can get conflicts when things load in areas of BuddyPress where they don’t need to, and conflicts happen. I run into this quite often with plugins that load Javascript.

BuddyPress categories and tags? Are you referring to a feature provided by a plugin or are you referring to the categories and tags that come with regular WordPress?

@lordsnake It’s now called multisite. Start with this: https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

Well, it’s not an easy thing to do fullstop. You have to know a certain amount of PHP and HTML to create or edit a WordPress theme, and it is no different here. Have you, via BP Template Pack, copied the templates / css / js into your theme? Does the CSS get loaded when you visit the front of the site?

Are you getting any errors? A blank site is usually called by a fatal error. Set WP_DEBUG to true in your config file define( ‘WP_DEBUG’, true ); . If you still don’t see any errors then do search through the files in wp-content/plugins/buddypress for any error_reporting(); calls and set it to error_reporting( E_ALL);

Same here, BuddyPress 1.2.5.2, WordPress 3.01 and can’t delete users.