My bbpress standalone 1.0.2 forum was using Human Test quite successfully up until last week, when it mysteriously quit working. It thinks everybody is a nonhuman. The few spam posts that appeared I did not mind deleting manually, then I would manually delete that user also.

Now I am getting about 50 new registrations every night (normally I get zero to one per day). Not a lot of spam posts, oddly enough.

So next I tried Akismet. It boasted that it was blocking 25 spams a night. But there is nowhere to check these spams--really? An email to the Akismet folks got me the reply that they don't have a clue where bbpress stores spams.

I would much rather block registrants than posts. Does bbpress 2.x have any protective measures built in, or are there any good plugins? Does 2.x play nicer with Akismet?

It's still a Taglogic issue, as far as I see.

Anyways, looks like it is unlikely to get fixed in core.

I *think* 2.1 is supposed to be a bit better with catching the spam.

Your main problem, like you said, is allowing guest posts.

Do you have akismet enabled?

Also I would use something like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-recaptcha/

For my Relationships Forum, obviously people are more inclined to seek help when they're not obliged to leave their public identities.

So this plugin leaves all Topics and Replies in a Pending and unpublished state.

The issue with Spam posts are these Spammers are also pumping the Tag with URLs or other rubbish.

From a logic point of view, Pending and/or Unpublished Topics/Replies shouldn't affect anything for a Published Topic.

But they are. I'm seeing Published Topics losing already established Tags from unPublished and Awaiting Moderation Repies which, in my opinion, is a bbPress bug and certainly not a logical workflow.

What are the issues you are having. People deleting/removing tags from threads?

Self policing is an open invitation to abuse the tagging system which is happening to me, at least.

It works similar to the awesome "Antispam Bee":
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/antispam-bee/

Greetinx, Dave :)

We made a premium bbPress spam killer Plugin. It kills spam dead!

The concept is loosely based around our own ideas and automatting some of Anointed's ideas.

The Spam Killer Plugin saves us a lot of time and money. Since the spam problem has cost us such a lot of time and money;

a) removing spam daily
b) testing many plugins that did not work
c) and finally building a new Plugin which took many many hours that fixes our problem

... we have decided to make it a premium plugin for sale on our site.

http://getshopped.org/premium-upgrades/premium-plugin/bbpress-spam-killer/

Best,
Dan

I guess my question is: how do you have them behave like the do here?

Where any tags entered into the tags field are simply appended to a topic, and previous ones remain untouched?

My assumption is that I'm doing something wrong, but it appears to happen on a fresh install with the default template.

But it isn't happening here! I can add tags and the previous ones remain, so maybe there's a but in the default template, but not in the core?

The next poster's message (regardless of user role) overwrites my tags or erases them all together.

In fact, every post overwrites the previous tags.

Que? Have I setup something wrong? This happened in a fresh install with the default template too.

If you only allow registered users to post then you could add captcha or something to the registration page.

Right now I have Forums deactivated until I here there is any type of solution.

Physlab

To answer your question:
bbPress does come with support for Akismet built into the newer vs. This will give the same protection that comments presently have. Akismet alone, is imo pretty much useless though.

I would also consider installing other plugins such as honeypots (traps that only bots fill out), moderation plugins, and there are also a ton of tricks you can add to your htaccess file that will also help a bit. I don't have a list of everything I use as it's on a home computer but will post a list whenever I can.

The biggest problem we are fighting right now is with actual people spamming the forums and not bots. That is pretty much impossible to stop and requires a lot of tedious work by the forum moderators to keep things clean.

As to IntenseDebate:
Well to each his own on that one. I personally don't like anyone else having access to my comments, even if it is just to help stop the spam. Same reason I personally don't run Akismet.

Finally keep in mind that custom post types (topics/replies) are simply just data in the db. It is entirelly possible to build plugins like IntenseDebate to work with bbPress should you so choose to. It all comes down to a matter of demand as to whether the actual companies will write a custom plugin for bbPress, or whether or not you actaully pay to have it built yourself.

On the comments conversation, by not standardizing to use WP comments and weaving off to use a custom post type, how do you think that leaves bbPress to counter to huge problem of Spam though?
Seems this alienates bbPress to utilize another great Automattic tool, IntenseDebate which I find an absolute godsend.

The forum space is very hot, including q and a. IF there ever was a time, it's now to make that decision or you'll see others steal your thunder as integrated solutions. This would work well for them since it won't look like a programmers tool, which it feels like more than an simpler plugin solution.

That is actually where the real magic comes in. Because bbPress uses standard post-types and taxonomies it means integrating with many other plugins is much simpler. Now that still leaves it up to the plugin authors to add support for bbPress. I can say that JJ took every possible step to make integrating with these plugins as simple and standard as possible.

Creating a custom theme is not as easy as I would have hoped for, but after time you get the hang of it. The only reason I have not personally written a 'how-to-theme' guide is because I still have a few remaining questions myself. You have seen firsthand though, that even someone with my little knowledge of coding can create a 100% custom theme capable of doing anything I want it to.

The best way to help out, is to simply jump in and answer any questions you can. I do the same, if I know the answer, I answer, if I don't I skip the question (probably makes people feel ignored, but better than to have me just say I don't know)

I chose bbPress over others but was most frustrated when I discovered it's theming integration issues. Thankfully Anointed came to my rescue.

The other issue of annoyance is the way it treats comments as a post-type which, to me anyway, removes it from being integrated with other services like IntenseDebate and Akismet - and obviously Spam is a real issue for forum operators.

I'm getting up to speed anyway and hope to help out where I can however most people's challenges seem to be around theming problems and functionality limitations, not to mention lack of help that is split across to different websites.

On a final note, thank you indeed for the work on bbPress and everyone's efforts. I'm sure it'll get there.

500+ spams in the last 6 days. The spammers are now experimenting with cloned text and board-relevant titles, with the 'watch' link at the bottom of post. Looking forwards to the lockout solution being implemented....

I think we need Anointed's user process turned into a Plugin. We're going to look at this later today...

Fact is:
- There is limited documentation about where to start (other than installing bbPress)
- There is limited documentation about how to enable theme support
- When you run into problems, you are on your own.

Somebody at Automattic should decide that some people should work dedicated on bbPress and bbPress only, otherwise nothing will change.

My 2 cents...