BuddyPress.org

this is an easy hacking technique, i’ve done that 3 times yesterday when trying to create users/blogs…

you can delete these users by going in the _signups table… the problem is that WordPress is not taking into consideration the registrations that are not completed, they store them in the signups table and they can not be reached when you check for users… so when a user create an account with a blog, the whole process is created but not verified… you can then visit the site without being logged in and without a trace.

WP 3.0 is different in that technique… but i suppose we could find a tweak right now.

nexia: That’s not the way the system works, if you find a bug you need to report it. Mentioning it on the forums isn’t going to highlight it to the developers.

Is there not a way for users to mark spammers and draw them to the admins attention as such?

The user hakam00 in this website is a desperate spammer … how many desperate lonely geeks does “Tina” think “she” will scam on this site?

Presumably “Tina” comes from Romania or Nigeria?

See below:

Subject: Hello.

“Hello.

My Name is Tina I was impressed when i saw your profile buddypress.org and i will like you to email me back to my inbox so that i can send you my picture for you to know who i am.i believe we can establish a long lasting relationship with you.

In addition,i will like you to reply me through my

private e mail box for more introduction

Thanks,waiting to hear from you soonest.

Tina.

Please write to my inbox so that i can send you my picture.”

I’m aware of the hakam00 thing. If akismet looked at BP private messages to see if they were spam, we’d also need to build in an area for people to go and ‘unspam’ the messages.

I got the same dummy message 2 hours ago. Marked as spam? Good

I actually responded to her email. Was I not supposed to? She seemed so nice.

@nexia

Haha! Yes, I told my wife about it and she said go ahead.

Seriously though, it is amazing that this is the first spam exploit that has hit our PM system. I get so many of these pathetic attempts via email each day that I was surprised this morning when I checked my email and saw that one had been sent via the BP PMing system.

Word. Patch it!

I’ve been having sign up spams (arguably a different issue) on my BP install, and just shut all signups down until I could figure out what to do about it.

Scouring the WordPress MU forums has made me realize three things:

1. Spamming is a huge problem for WordPress MU users

2. I’m betting that BuddyPress will/might have even larger problems due to the very nature of the beast (it’s all about users, right? Which is where the bots/spammers gravitate)

3. There are no sure-fire methods for preventing spammers

…well, there’s a fourth, too…

4. Many of the old hats on the WordPress MU forums are getting tired of explaining how to defend against so-called “splog” signup bots and spammers.

Just some observations, as BP just received its first official spammer. (Yes, I got the email too, and saw the small twitter firestorm this morning over it.)

Hi Andy, I think you are incorrect there. Spammers like to send spam. I am sure you get some in your email?

What is easier to get into a nice big community (without having to create a blog) and easily (?) send spam PM to all members of the community? You don’t even have to infect computers, as you can use the internal messaging system and you know most users will get the message as an email as well.

Hey, it saves them from email harvesting or buying ‘5 billion email addreses’ dbases as the community has already done this.

So, no, apparently (and this example that started this topic has proven this), it is possible on BuddyPress and it serves the spammers purpose, so disabling blog registration will not stop this. You can disable blog and user registration, but it might be hard to start a community that way..

Cheers, Harry

Hi DJ Paul.

as far as I can see, nobody is complaining that the sky is falling, that would be a quite silly thing to do. Well I guess technically it is, but at least the earth is stopping it from doing so

Just pointing out an inaccuracy in thinking, I am sure that this is allowed without immediately posting PHP to fix it?

Back on topic; the question should also be: how could this spammer get access to all the usernames automatically? Of course everybody is listed, but somehow the were harvested and added to the pm list.

– Anyway, I think a very good start is that you can only message your friends. Thought that this would be already ths case, that is why I wondered how we could get spammed?

– Additionally: a maximum of PM’s per user per x amount of time (seems that 1/minute should be enough, + 50 per day. of course this should be optional and configurable with error notification (site options or plugin?)

– Maybe a maximum mailbox size, which included sent messages. So that at least spammers have to clean out their sent box before being able to send new messages.

– Also a maximum of adressees per PM, else the other 2 are useless

– maybe a minimum age of user (meaning time since registration), before he can send out PM at all?

Of course, any of these can be worked around, but at least it might slow spam down, at least from strangers..

Cheers, Harry