Topic: How to stop Spam once and for all, please?

How to stop Spam once and for all, please?

@sem101

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

Hi, I really like BuddyPress and have spend months setting up a new site. It not until after the site goes live, you *truly* get to test scenarios, tweaks, bugs, flaws, patterns, etc.

We get TONS of Spam registrations and Spam users create Groups! I go through hours per day deleting new users.

To BuddyPress developers or experienced BuddyPress users (over 1 year live):

1. Is there a checklist somewhere for security? I will promise to follow all your suggestions and enable step by step security!
2. Are there *recommended* plugins? Either paid or free is fine. We don’t care about paid. We just want the Spam to stop! If we cannot stop Spam, we cannot use BuddyPress 🙁

We have tried a few and they just don’t work good, e.g. captcha, honeypot, etc.

Thank you for your help in advance!

Sorry for my poor English.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

@sharmavishal

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

https://wordpress.org/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/

Above plugin is the only plugin you will ever require to stop spam. Donate to plugin author if it stops spam on your site to keep the plugin alive

@sem101

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

From developer of Stop Spammers:

2/21/2014: I am ending support of this plugin. I will be asking WordPress to remove it from the Repository as it causes too many problems.

@sem101

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

Of course, my thread gets hijacked by a spammer 🙁 Geez, this is too much!

@djsteveb

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

sem101 – I use two plugins that ask questions before signup

Buddypress Humanity
and
Good Question

This prevents most of the bot sign ups that we plaguing us for some time with those group creators.

This does not stop the manual spam signups, so we have delete a few accounts each week, but it has prevented the tons that we were dealing with before.

We used to have good luck with https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-registration-options/screenshots/

but we started having some issues around bp1.7 I think. Other people say it works now (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/feature-request-new-user-moderation/ ) – but I don’t have time to play with half baked / half working solutions. Your experience with it may be fine.

We do not use si captcha any longer as we had issues with some multisite problems. I do think it slowed down some of the spammers, and certainly cost them time and a little money to get around it – so it’s cool.

I use one of the blog defaults type plugins to auto set new blogs/(sites) to have settings like ‘users must be logged in to comment’ – and “discourage search engines from indexing” – this has helped a bunch for us.

Of course the manual spammers will still need to be manually deleted – you will never stop the manual spammers, if you did, then you would stop regular people from signing up. Unless of course you went for one of those “invite only” buddypress setups.

I recently donated to a plugin author to create a new plugin that allows superadmins to force certain settings on sub-site/sub-blog users.. like forcing only allowing registered / logged in users to comment. That plugin is working, but it is not quite polished enough for wp repository release I think – but that is another kind of spam blocking issue.

Hope these tips help you, they have made a huge difference for me.

@djsteveb

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

sem101 – I use two plugins that ask questions before signup

Buddypress Humanity
and
Good Question

This prevents most of the bot sign ups that we plaguing us for some time with those group creators.

This does not stop the manual spam signups, so we have delete a few accounts each week, but it has prevented the tons that we were dealing with before.

We used to have good luck with /bp-registration-options/

but we started having some issues around bp1.7 I think. Other people say it works now (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/feature-request-new-user-moderation/ ) – but I don’t have time to play with half baked / half working solutions. Your experience with it may be fine.

We do not use si captcha any longer as we had issues with some multisite problems. I do think it slowed down some of the spammers, and certainly cost them time and a little money to get around it – so it’s cool.

I use one of the blog defaults type plugins to auto set new blogs/(sites) to have settings like ‘users must be logged in to comment’ – and “discourage search engines from indexing” – this has helped a bunch for us.

Of course the manual spammers will still need to be manually deleted – you will never stop the manual spammers, if you did, then you would stop regular people from signing up. Unless of course you went for one of those “invite only” buddypress setups.

I recently donated to a plugin author to create a new plugin that allows superadmins to force certain settings on sub-site/sub-blog users.. like forcing only allowing registered / logged in users to comment. That plugin is working, but it is not quite polished enough for wp repository release I think – but that is another kind of spam blocking issue.

Hope these tips help you, they have made a huge difference for me.

arg – tried to post a reply and I think it got akistmetted for having two links…
/wonders why they do not whitelist links to wordpress org / buddypress org here for that setting somehow.. sheesh

@mth75

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

I use Cleantalk, sadly commercial (8 euros) but it works, only one human spammer who got registered in there database an hour after he spammed my site. My site is http://www.starry-night.nl.

@sharmavishal

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

@sem101 i am aware about the status of the plugin hence I asked you to donate if it worked.

That plugin is working fine on a bp site of mine for past 1 year

And if you think my replies to your queries are spam then good luck figuring out the answer to your query!!!

@tecca

Participant

10 years, 7 months ago

WangGuard is a great plugin. I had about a dozen spam registrations every day before installing it. With it installed, I haven’t yet gotten a spam registration.