BuddyPress.org

I was on tour for two months this summer and normally I’m pretty good about keeping on top of the spam, but on the road the only thing I had time for was content, not maintenance. Apparently the message got out that nobody was policing the site and it started getting hammered. I came home to find spam membership accounts coming in every two minutes and new spam user groups being created faster than I could delete them, spam in the forums, spam comments hitting the blog from the spam user accounts. I felt like I was on a sinking ship for a few weeks. Seriously. But that appears to have been solved and I’m amazed. Here’s what I did.

1) First thing I did was to change permissions so that users could no longer create user groups. That kind of sucked, but I needed to stop the spamalanche. I then installed the Buddypress Group Management plugin. It’s a little outdated – I’m running the most current versions of WP and BP – so it doesn’t appear within the BP system preferences and it actually set up a separate Buddypress area just for itself, but who cares. It gave me a clear roster of all of the groups on my site and the option to delete them from the management page and 90 minutes later hundreds of spam groups were gone, no new ones were rolling in and I had a smile on my face for the first time weeks.

2) I installed another plugin called Spam Destroyer. I don’t know how this plugin works. There aren’t any settings that go with it. It said all you needed to do was install it and it would take care of the rest, was highly rated, and the developer claimed to have great success with it on his own site. Fifteen minutes later I had only a couple spam user registrations get through and even though they spam commented on a dozen blog pages, I was really freakin happy.

3) I then installed the Stop Spammer Registrations Plugin. This one checks comments and logins 15 different ways to block spammers.

Guess what? It’s 24 hours later and I’ve had zero spam registrations come through. Zero. I’ve had zero spam user groups created. I’ve had zero spam comments in the forums. I haven’t even had a single spam comment show up on my blog. I’m honestly completely flabbergasted and grateful at the magnitude of how well this worked so if you’re having a similar problem give this a shot. It’s only been 24 hours – but the past 24 hours have been bliss.