BuddyPress.org

Here is a recap of some posts I posted at http://buddydev.com recently:

I use Bp-Cosmic-Pro Theme built of of bp-mag and have about one spam registration per couple of weeks (and it’s usually a real person that registers and gets through)… They are caught within minutes of posting something ridiculous and marked as spammers by the admins.

There are a number of reasons for that:

1. It’s a closed/ register only site (but free to all), (note: I do not require e-mail validation either)
2. I use BuddyPress Humanity Anti-Spam Plugin
3. I use Si-Captcha Anti-Spam
3. Multiple Profile fields are required to be filled-in at registration as an ANTI-SPAM measure – in part.
4. I have a TERMS and use that Requires THE CHECKING of a box to register.
5. I use the bad behavior plugin to keep out the crazies and use the Blocking-list feature of it.

Occasionally, I get the I can’t register e-mail, but it is rare and there is a note for people to contact me if they can’t register properly… I have 1700 active (non-spam users) on my site and virtually no SPAM.

I believe one of the keys to success here is that it is a “private site” and as such it’s not indexed (I realize this could be a problem for many sites, but not my niche site). So, sites don’t scrape it as a potential source to attack.

I would also recommend the ANIMAL BuddyPress Captcha plugin.

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I usually think about SPAM protection in the form of a Castle for open community WordPress Sites:
1. The Moat: Programs like Bad-Behavior and plugins that stop bots/scrapers before they get “through” to the site.
2. The Gate/Drawbridge: Programs like Captchas, Math Challenges, Reverse fields that SHOULDN’T be filled in to “trap” bots from auto-filling.
3. The Keep: Programs like Akismet.
4. The Guards: Moderators with the ability to knock out spam when they see it.

The biggest issue with BuddyPress is that THERE IS NO KEEP (no. 3 above) for the Activity Streams…
As far as I know, there are not programs like Akismet or any of the “KARMA” / Comment anti-spam plugins that work for the BuddyPress group/activity/forum streams… DJ-PAUL has talked about making Akismet work on BuddyPress Streams at the BuddyPress.org site, but there is nothing yet that I know of yet –

If anyone does know of something that will “auto-moderate” the BuddPress Stream updates/comments, please let me know…

Regards.

@pisanojm you raise some very valid points about spamming over here… but tell me, why is it that you chose to avoid the “confirmation email link” option… its a sureshot way of overcoming most of the automated spam-bots out there… yes, you can still have manual registrations who want to mess with your site… but this is something we just have to deal with.

Max we as admin can do is to spot the bad guys (community flagging), and delete there stuff as well as bar them from registering again… atleast thats my opinion.

Sid.

I use bp-moderation for that, Pisanojm. It’s abandoned, I think, and has UI problems in the backend, but users can flag content and it shows up in the backend for me. It’s clunky and I wish it was still being actively developed, but it works fine once you’ve edited the admin screen hooks per this to make sure the UI shows up in the dashboard.

@psivait What @andrea_r is talking about robots.txt and rel=“nofollow” to noindex the link?

robots.txt
`User-agent: *
Disallow: /register/`

rel=“nofollow”

In your child theme: sidebar.php
`<?php printf( __( ' You can also create an account.’, ‘buddypress’ ), site_url( BP_REGISTER_SLUG . ‘/’ ) ) ?>`