Topic: Thousands of spam subscribers

Thousands of spam subscribers

@orbitor

Participant

12 years ago

I have just taken over maintaining a neglected wp with bp site theculinarytrust.org . I have updated to wordpress 3.5.1 and buddypress 1.6.4 and all is working well. The problem is with the site’s subscribers. There are over 35,000 subscribers, most of which are sploggers. I’ve been using WangGuard for the last week or so, and it does a great job spotting new splog signups. The problem is all the old subscribers. I’ve tried the WangGuard wizard, but it does not get anywhere near the number of sploggers I need removed.

Is there some plugin that could help me filter out human subscribers? Is there some way to send an email to all subscribers to verify their humanity!?

Hope you can help with any ideas or solutions.

Thanks!
Andrei

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

@raphadko

Participant

12 years ago

What I use is buddypress captcha for registration, works like a charm!

@chouf1

Participant

12 years ago

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/unconfirmed/

@slaffik

Moderator

12 years ago

I use this: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stop-spammer-registrations-plugin/
And this: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-registration-options/
The first one catches spam. The second – those that the 1st one overlooked.
From that time – no spam at all.

@johnnymestizo

Participant

12 years ago

@chouf1 Where the heck did this come from ! Awesome 🙂 Cheers

@jconti

Participant

12 years ago

Hi @orbitor

How you said, WangGuard works great for protect your website and with the Wizard you can check many of the old ones. But every website is different and WangGuard knows many old Sploggers, but not all of them. WangGuard is only 1 year an 11 month old (today).

The first year blocked 750.000 sploggers, and in the in the next 11 months, 5.000.0000 sploggers. You can see that its growth is exponential.

About your question if there is a tool for check the humanity of your old users… I’m sorry but only WangGuard. WangGuard is the only tool out there to check users

Kind regards

@orbitor

Participant

12 years ago

@chouf1 this is very useful, although I cannot find the bulk options on the plugin…

@slaffik stop spammer plugin looks very aggressive – just what I need. Also, very little to do in terms of maintaining user database – I like!

@jconti thanks, I think the unconfirmed plugin will take me places I want to go, but I will continue to use wangguard and see if it catches anything that gets past stop spammer!

@chouf1

Participant

12 years ago

here’s another plugin made by @imath which can help to wipe oup defect/unwanted/sleeping users.
https://github.com/imath/bp-wake-up-sleepers
Still in Beta but works good on 3.5.1/1.6.4