@wpbp, The problem is that many spam nowadays are not bots but real human spam. I have same problem on one of my installation. all you can do is to ban the domain which has been a source of spam to your site. e.g: spam1@me-now.com. spam22@me-now.com
when you put “me-now.com” in the following code, it will ban any email from me-now.com, Put it in your functions.php
http://pastebin.com/a2mTNVZX
Note: I have 3 sets of this code, I have the one which can ban specific email from gmail, yahooo, hotmail etc without banning other users using gmail, yahooo, hotmail. if you want that aswell i can post it or all the 3 if someone can release it as a free plugin , no problem.
Naijaping
@wpbp 1. Disable registration in Settings > General.
2. Disable group creation in Settings > BuddyPress > Settings > Groups.
3. Disable album creation/uploading of images in the plugin’s settings or are you referring to native WP image galleries?
You can enable group creation and registration after you’ve done some general housekeeping and adding some spam/spammer prevention.
One plugin that looks good for preventing registration spam is WangGuard. (Search for it in the WordPress repository.) I’ve just installed it, so can’t tell you if it’s as good as it sounds. (I run a very busy blog and allow commenting by unregistered users. Akismet catches spam and Conditional Captcha deletes it without my seeing it. The latter reduced spam from hundreds of comments a day [marked by Akismet] to near-zero. Only the occasional human spammer gets in.)
Allowing unmoderated registrations is spammer nirvana. 😉 I allowed posting by unregistered users so I could turn off user registration. Now that I’m wanting to use Buddypress, I had to enable registration but installed WanGuard. Within a few hours, I had one registration attempt — even though Buddypress can’t be seen anywhere on the site yet — but no successful registration, thanks to WangGuard. Tomorrow will tell me more.
@wpbp
I produced a small plugin that is geared toward automated spam attacks but I haven’t gotten any feedback as far as its effectiveness:
https://github.com/bphelp/bp-spam-killer
As far as spam attacks from real users I think there are helpful solutions out there but spammer hacker types will always find way to circumvent any prevention method so the best prevention as an admin is being active on your site.
Are there any current plugin solutions which can delete accumulated BP spam groups? The BP Group Management plugin did this, from what I’ve read, but it gives error messages with the current versions WP 3.5.1 and BP 1.7.2
Any suggestions will be appreciated as I have a couple dozen WP-BP sites and some have 1000-5000 groups that are spam generated. Manually deleting these would take me until 2014!
maybe not as long as you think if you use the backend, can’t you mass delete them that way?
Leofitz, WangGuard will check your user base for spammers and delete them.
See https://wordpress.org/plugins/wangguard/
The author says that “WangGuard not only protect your site from sploggers, spam users or unwanted users, WangGuard cleans your database from them. No plugin or service does this, only with WangGuard you will get this feature,” and I believe him. His English may not be too good, but the plugin is really outstanding.
There’s just one consideration for you: In order to have your database cleaned up, you will have to submit far more than 500 queries the first month. Perhaps you can arrange to pay for a month?
Here’s my suggestion to reduce database queries after that. (It worked for me.) Buddypress allows for the customization of User Profiles. Add a couple of questions that require a certain amount of intelligence to answer and make them required. That means the form will not be submitted either to WordPress or to WangGuard if the required fields are not filled out. It’s not fool-proof, but it decreased queries on my very busy site to just a few a day.
Incidentally, I added a question, “How do you plan to participate?” Among the choices offered the user are these:
“I want to increase my online presence.” and
“I want to sell my stuff.”
We don’t need anyone not bright enough to figure out that these replies do not make the user desirable. Now all I need is a script to automatically kick out users who choose these replies. 😉 (As it is, they can be manually deleted if other users report them.)
I don’t know what happens to a group when all the users are unsubscribed, so this may not be precisely what you are looking for. But WangGuard will make your site secure against almost all sploggers. (One registrant passed all tests on our site, and we had to delete manually, but that person must have registered manually too.)
Good luck!
Inge (http://ssnet.org)
