Use the search before posting. There are literally dozens of threads about this common problem.
You are correct there are dozens of threads out there and most of them are from when I put my buddypress site on hold (ver. 103 late 2009- 20010) because i could not control splogs. I tried all the suggestions from the posts but still had sploggers working around everything. I am researching the environment now to get the site up and running and it does not seem to have changed much. It has been the #1 thorn-in-the-side of Buddypress and still appears to be so. I have spent hours on this and would appreciate an answer, also.
These automated bots are usually just that, automated that are programmed to look for specific strings in search engines that return a list of buddypress sites and then harvested. I was getting hammered with 20+ blogs getting created a day that was spam. I tried ever plugin and .htaccess tricks known to man and none of them worked. I was tired of all of the spam I was getting so I put on my tin foil and went to war. I was determined to win this war and to stop 99.9% of automated spam dead in its tracks.
First I went to cpanel and under the “Website Traffic” on the left side of the page and clicked “View all traffic” then clicked on my domain name.
When the statistics page for that domain loaded I looked on the left hand side of the page for “Search Keyphrases”, this will show me a list of the keyphrases that was used to find my site.
I found all the keyphrases that was used by the spammers to find my site in the search engines and here is the list of the keyphrases.
1. intext create an account username required email address required blog details inurl register
2. to start connecting please log in first. you can also create an account. .cr. blogs
3. allintext create an account account details profile details blog details yes i d like to create a new blog
4. yes i d like to create a new blog
5. “blog url required ” inurl /register
6. “yes i’d like to create a new blog”
7. intext create an account blog details inurl register
8. to start connecting please log in first. you can also create an account. .be.blogs
9. inurl register yes i d like to create a new blog
10. intext blogs create an account username email address blog details inurl register
11. to start connecting please log in first. you can also create an account. .de.
What I did was I went downloaded the buddypress to my desktop and open every file with NotePad++ and started searching for “create an account; blog details; yes i d like to create a new blog” Once I found those strings, I changed the name to something else and on the registration page I removed the “yes i/d like to create a new blog” along with its checkbox completely and i searched everything with the word “blog” and changed it to something completely different. I Also renamed the “bp-blog.php” and the /bp-blog/ folder.
Make sure to search through the other files in the buddypress folder for anything calling the “bp-blog.php” and the /bp-blogs/ and rename it accordingly.
It has been a week since I done this and I have yet to be spammed. I went from 20 a day to zero overnight by doing this.
Let me also add, you may want to change the file names for your login and registration pages too.. Like if you have to go to http://yoursite.com/registration.php rename it to http://yoursite.com/reg123.php remember to look trough the files that calls registration.php and rename it accordingly.
lol how ironic that a spammer shows up on a spam thread 1 year old
can the mods please remove the above french spammer and ban the user panlong
The spam comment by “panlong” is still here after 2 weeks and 5 days…This says a lot about BuddyPress I think. We have started up a new site with BP, still not ready, but I think we’ll have to close it because of all spam members and spam activity, if we can not get help how to stop it. It’s UNBELIEVABLE how much spam we get. Three persons had made 100 membership each as well!!!
This Akismet plugin is for comments, but this is not so much needed as you can have comments with moderation.
I really think spam protection should be included from the beginning in the BudyPress plugin!
Another issue as well is that someone made a group without showing who created it. It doesn’t show up in the activity stream, even if I filter “created a group” either.
Something else, the page forums doesn’t show up. It says:
The forums component has not been set up yet.
What do I need to do?
@ A Swede in Greece
You could try this plugin:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/
But you’ll want the beta version as it fixes an issue with BuddyPress
http://www.blogseye.com/beta-test-plugins/
Also, you should look into installing ZBBlock.
http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php
@MickeyRoush
Thankyou very much, I’ll check these up, seems like it could be what we need…
