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...

I spend at least an hour a day answering every question in the forum that I am able to. There are other people that do their best to help out as well.

Bottom line is we simply need more people who have the time to spend a few minutes a day in here to help out other users. This forum is run exclusively by volunteers only, so we all do what we can.

I was talking to a security specialist about this type of thing and he said that a lot of other forum solutions offer this in a comparable fashion. I'm not going to use anything else though... I'm a WordPress guy :P

I have to admit though, I was running open posting with no spam protection, so it was my fault.

My current plan of attack is going to be a little bit different.

I will allow normal signups as usual, however the users will be classified as subscribers and will have zero permissions to post.

Once they are a member, then they will have to go in and fill out yet another page (extended profile page) of information in order to change their status to 'forum participant'.

On that page I will use honeypots and a few other tricks. This page url will also auto-rotate urls to try and stop some of the automation.

Even then I will set it up so that a person has to have their first post approved by a moderator prior to it becoming visible to the public.

You will not see a users 'website' in their profile until they have 10 posts.

Users will not be able to insert any url into their topic/reply until they have at least 5 topics.

I can do that because I have 50+ very active moderators on my site, so there would be little to no delay in their first post being approved.

This won't stop the manual spam input by humans. For that I am going to have to rely on my moderators.

I have no idea if this will work, but figured I would try it.

No one is going to care about the extra steps involved. And if they do, then I don't want them in my house anyhow.

Currently our site is running the latest version of bbPress, we have the Akismet Plugin activated & running, and we also have the Stop Spammer Registrations reCAPTCHA Plugin for new user registration.

We have tried the reCaptcha for bbPress 2.0 this didn't make much difference and we couldn't use this Plugin in conjunction with the spammer registration Plugin so have removed it for now for testing.

We are running out of ideas and things to try. Here is an image illustrating the crap being posted on our forums: http://instinct-downloads.s3.amazonaws.com/bbpress-spam.jpg

Can anybody else relate to this?

We're getting nailed by spam and its not good. Michelle was going to post the following but I decided to copy it here instead:

We have a huge problem with spam! (40+ posts a day) We have tried quite a few things to try and get rid of this problem but nothing seems to be working.

We are running out of ideas and things to try so are reaching out to you guys for some help or suggestions, have we missed something or can anyone recommend a solution to all this spam.

My solution and best thinking involved finding the spammers in the real world and removing their hands as punishment :P

The simplest solution would be a moderation queue. We have a low volume discussion forum (it serves as a held desk), and it would be fine to queue topics and replies for approval.

A better solution would be something more integrated with existing spam blockers. I'd like to see the same overall quality of Akismet spam blocking as the main WP.

Make sure you turn off xmlrpc. Pippin (google him) wrote a Plugin that worked for us. It is a pretty serious issue though because if left unattended you might loose your SEO ranking.

1. I added "WP-reCAPTCHA" to the registration form - this seems to have halted new registrations for the moment.
2. Kept the forum set so that users must register to post.
3. I left regular comments so anyone can post - akizmet caches everything there.

I wrote a make-shift plugin to prune all the spam-bot-old users just to make sure.

https://github.com/unFocus/Prune-Users

Also check your forum tags - the bots have been gumming those up too.

Kevin N.

When I delete the spam accounts, afaik, it's deleting the entire thread that they had spammed, not just their comment. when I hit the "spam" button, the spam still shows up in the thread, just highlighted in red.