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How to Turn Off Email Notifications for All Users


  • Tranny
    Participant

    @tranny

    Hello,

    how can I turn off email notifications for all existing users, and make the option disabled as a default setting for new signups?

    Thank you for your help.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

  • kalico
    Participant

    @kalico

    There are a few ways to do this, and it depends a bit on why you want to do it. If you are in development, and just want to ensure that no users get emails while you’re working on stuff, I highly recommend Postman SMTP. You can configure it so that all emails get logged, but not actually sent. It’s very useful for troubleshooting and for protecting your users from accidental mail. But with the ability to still see what “would be” sent, if you were live.

    If you have a different goal — like just eliminating the sign up or activation emails, that’s a different thing. If you post up a bit more detail, I’m sure you’ll get the info you need. 🙂


    Tranny
    Participant

    @tranny

    @kalico I have a serious problem with spammers, and BP doesn’t have any useful features to deal with spam. I have spammers manually posting activity updates in which they tag hundreds of random users in order to force them to receive email notification containing spam. Same with friend connections, which spammers use in order to force my site members to receive emails with their spam message (they change their display name into a message containing the URL to their site).


    danbp
    Participant

    @danbp

    @tranny,

    dealing with spammers is a long run work, to not say a never ending work. There is no miraculous plugin or trick to stop them.
    And even if you would be a genius coder creator of an extra super original spam shield, you could be sure to became target #1 of all spammers, because in this case, you would represent the absolute challenger of all code breakers !

    Back to real life.

    Most of updates spam comes directly into the DB. Bots are clever and don’t need to login to do that.
    Some spammers are real people, and once they are logged, they do their stuff manually. These people can be isolated, but to do this, you have to find them in the user list. Which is absolutely not easy and time comsumting. And of course, this is not prevention but intervention, after you where spammed.

    You could also track IP‘s, but again, this can be helpfull only AFTER you where spammed. But getting ip’s on admin user list is a great way to gain time. Once you have the IP, you can consult many anti spam sites who store any bot and user known to be attackers. And eventually ban them with this plugin.

    For now, first thing to do is to clean your user list. Whatever suspect username, like a589xdf or special to BP, Bill UNERHOOD, can be eliminated. The first example use alpha-numeric digits, the second a very well formed first and last name. It’s extremely rare that normal users enter such credentials. In addition to this, you can check their email. Why would you, for example, have members with a polish email (@blogmedykamenty.pl) if you’re in New Zeeland and your site relates about pets ? In this case, you can raisonably doubt about an interest between medicaments and pets ! You can fire such user.

    All this may be good and well, but you have also to hardening WP. This means using another table prefix as wp_ at very first. And second, to not use “admin” as user name. Never !
    Read also @venutius tutorial

    You have to clean out the existing spammers, unfortunately manually. And to avoid upcoming spam.

    To calm down the bots – in case you receive dozen of spam daily, close all comments and deactivate notices and messages component in bp settings for 2 or 3 weeks.

    Also, in case you’re on a dedicated server, you really need to enforce his security. But this is out of the scope of this forum.


    Tranny
    Participant

    @tranny

    @danbp i appreciate your response, unfortunately I didn’t find what I was looking for it in. When I talked about lacking features, I was talking about such features as limiting how many friend connection a person can make, how many members can a person tag in their update, etc…

    Whereas no such features exist in BP, I’d appreciate guidance to turn off email notifications. All other considerations are an important part of keeping the installation secure overall, but to address the specific threat I’m facing, I need to be able to turn off email notifications. I was hoping that is the type of help I’d get here.


    danbp
    Participant

    @danbp


    Tranny
    Participant

    @tranny

    Hello @danbp

    I appreciate suggestions. I implemented the code suggested in the other thread into my functions.php file, but I understand that will only turn off notifications for new users. Is there a way to turn them off for existing users?

    Hey @danbp

    I just thought I’d jump in here real quick, as I think this will be beneficial to everyone in the thread including @Tranny.

    And even if you would be a genius coder creator of an extra super original spam shield, you could be sure to became target #1 of all spammers, because in this case, you would represent the absolute challenger of all code breakers !

    We are that “genius coder creator of an extra super original spam shield” that you speak of. 🙂

    There is no miraculous plugin or trick to stop them.

    Ahh, but there is.

    It’s real, and it’s even called WP-SpamShield. LOL…you can’t make this stuff up. 🙂

    Check it out on WPorg. It’s been out for about two and a half years, and is forked from another plugin we developed almost a decade ago. It works perfectly and automatically on BuddyPress, bbPress, and pretty much everything else. You can also feel free to check out the plugin documentation here.

    …And for the record, we definitely are a huge target of spammers. 🙂

    dealing with spammers is a long run work, to not say a never ending work.

    True story!

    – Scott


    Tranny
    Participant

    @tranny

    Hey Scott @redsand

    Thank you for your message. I’m gonna take a look at the plugin you have suggested. I’m still hoping that BP developers will implement basic features that would help in countering spam. Some such features would be:

    1 – Ability to turn off email notifications for all existing users, and choose a default setting for new users
    2 – Ability to set a limit on how many members can be tagged per post
    3 – Ability to set a limit on how many friendship connections can a member make per day, and the ability to set after how many pending friendship requests the member can’t make any more requests
    4 – Ability to set a period in days after registration, during which a newly registered member will not be able to tag anyone or make friendship connections
    5 – Ability to force moderation on BP related posts similar to WP core, whereby a post would be held in moderation unless a user has an approved post

    Features like that would most certainly be welcome by owners of larger sites, and probably by owners of smaller sites too. They can be frequently encountered in other scripts.

    I do realize that fighting spam is a neverending battle, but features I’ve been talking about would make a significant impact on a webmaster’s ability to reduce it, especially since right now BP doesn’t have anything to mitigate it in any way.

    Hi @Tranny,

    Trust me, I completely hear you. You’re right. Ideally anti-spam controls like that should be built-in.

    Those are great suggestions. We’ll take a hard look at possibly including those features in future versions of WP-SpamShield as well. One thing you’ll find by using a plugin like WP-SpamShield is that it will block 100% of bots, and it will prevent most human spammers from even registering (which keeps them from even getting to a place where they can spam other users), and it will make it difficult for them to post their spammy messages.

    Let us know if we can help in any way.

    – Scott

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
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