Spammers register on every single forum or community/blog on the net how do envisage stopping them? It’s simply a pandemic that has to be manually dealt with, there can’t be automated / plugin solutions for everything.
If you run a small community, and you are able to confirm registrations, you can use the plugin “Confirm User Registration”. by this plugin, users register to your website will be activated automatically, but they cannot post anything untill you confirm their registration. If you guess the registered user might be a spammer, you can delete it before it can harm your website. Most of the time a spammer uses irregullar email addresse, or username.
Although this is not a sollution, but it can help you prevent spammers do what they want.
@hnla thanks for your reply but Im not asking so we can solve Internets biggest problem, Im asking about a specific problem regarding buddypress.
@aminima Thanks for your suggestion, but thats not an option. Its an active community and users want to participate when they register. Approving manually it is not an option, unfortunately 
Im surprised the buddypress team did not come with a permanent solution about this major problem ….
Ok, I knew this is not a good option. 
This is not a buddypress only problem, it’s global. Even the best platforms around the world suffers from spammers!
I just forgot to say that, to enable auto activation of users, this plugin is needed: “BP Disable Activation” (just for others who might like that)
Im surprised the buddypress team did not come with a permanent solution about this major problem ….
What major problem and why or how could BP sort it if – no offence to BP – more mature apps can’t! If a numpty idiot is paid to post pointless irritating spam on as many sites as they can in day then what can you do other than as suggested manually approve, what would you wish to do? Or are we talking about some other issue?
Hugo Im talking about about robots spam users not those spam idiots as you call them. When having a normal WP site noone registers, right after the installation of BP hundreds registered! If theres no specific solution its better to just answer that instead of generealizing your answer…
@Gregykos believe it or not a lot of those “robots” are actually people.
another plug in that might help you is called ban hammer it allows you to blacklist specific emails or entire domains
The best solution I have found to stop spam is forcing users to fill out a CAPTCHA on registration. It’s not ideal, but it’s part of the price of entry for our community.
It looks like WangGuard will do the job. It can detect spam users that has already been registered, it can report them and delete them from the system. It also prevents from registering at least those who has been reported before.
What about changing the register slug? Is this still something that should be done?
It looks like WangGuard will do the job. It can detect spam users that has already been registered, it can report them and delete them from the system. It also prevents from registering at least those who has been reported before.
interesting gonna check that out could be a huge time saver thanks for the info!
My site for Battle City was getting hit hard with spam user registrations. I wrote a post about it in the forums here.
At some point I realized, I will never defeat the spam user registrations. My efforts helped to limit them, but not eliminate the problem. So I decided, maybe what I need to do is limit the impact. The spam user registrations are still there, but now I barely see them. This is what I do:
To limit the spam user registrations, I use “Buddypress Humanity” and “SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam”. “Askimet” then picks up on most of the spam comments posted by those who still manage to register.
Next, I use “BuddyPress Block Activity Stream Types”. With this plugin I hide all new user registration messages from the Activity stream.
Finally, I use “User Spam Remover” plugin to go in once every couple of weeks to mass delete 95% of all spam users.
This doesn’t eliminate the problem, but makes life more manageable and keeps most of the spam users out of sight unless they manage to get past Askimet and post some messages.
Interesting how compatible with buddypress is User Spam Remover? It mentions some stuff about bbpress in the faq but not buddypress. i could see mass deleting completely inactive users but maybe they just created some activity updates or joined a group or something would hate to catch those kind of users in my net.
EDIT: i just saw your other post will comment further there.
