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Need Advice for Stopping Spam at the Gate

  • @grantbrown

    Participant

    8 years ago

    I help run a close-knit community site running BuddyPress. Due to the nature of the community, our users are very sensitive to perceived censorship and react strongly when their messages are blocked. I am running into two issues because of this.

    1. BuddyPress appears to have a built-it activity feed spam filter (Akismet?). I can’t figure out any way to disable this, which means I have to manually approve messages that have been automatically marked as spam. We’ve had very few issues with spammers on our activity feed and I want to disable this spam filter entirely. It’s doing more harm than good.

    2. We are trying to block spammers from registering on the site. We use WangGuard and Google reCAPTCHA to accomplish this but they are still getting in somehow. They typically don’t cause any harm outside of creating spammy groups but they are a nuisance. Any suggestions on how to better lock down our registration page?

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

  • @modemlooper

    Moderator

    8 years ago

    Make sure your registration slug is not “registration” or “signup” or any other guessable word. Change the slug frequently.

    Use this https://github.com/pixeljar/BuddyPress-Honeypot

    @grantbrown

    Participant

    8 years ago

    @modemlooper We tried that plugin but it hasn’t been updated in years and doesn’t seem to work anymore.

    @modemlooper

    Moderator

    8 years ago

    Use this fork, fixed it

    https://github.com/modemlooper/BuddyPress-Honeypot

    @grantbrown

    Participant

    8 years ago

    Thanks, we’ll give that a shot.

    @redsand

    Participant

    8 years ago

    WP-SpamShield will take care of all of that for you. 🙂

    Full disclosure: I’m the developer.

    @djsteveb

    Participant

    8 years ago

    ip geo block plugin best dam thing ever.

    shield firewall plugin just to disable xmlrpc or a disable xmlrpc plugin

    “good question” (https://wordpress.org/plugins/good-question/) or similar – adds a question that must be answered to finish registering

    wp spmashield

    limit login attempts

    sucuri hardening

    audit log and multisite register ips (for the manual dedicated spammers)

    this mix seems to make like tough for them – especially the ip geo block stopping several countries from abusing the site..

    ymmv
    dj Steve

    ps


    @redsand     – good to see you active in bp threads! your plugin is a miracle, especially since akismet changed – one on bp site I did have to fiddle with the settings for forms or something recently – vaguely remember users having trouble sending pms were getting the you cant do that permissions thing until I messed with it a bet.. just like 2 weeks ago.

    @adjunkten

    Participant

    8 years ago

    Hi

    #2, Buddypress Registration Options is doing the job for me.

    @redsand

    Participant

    8 years ago

    Hi @djsteveb:

    Thanks for the awesome feedback! We always want to improve the plugin. If you could contact us via our support form, it would allow us to look into that. With a little modification on our end we should be able to auto-detect, and make it so no one has to tweak any settings.

    – Scott

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