Topic: 400 new spammers signed up in one day

400 new spammers signed up in one day

jbrzr3
Member

@jbrzr3

14 years, 6 months ago

Wow, why is this happening? Do any of you have the same problem? Phpbb has a feature where you have to approve a member’s registration before they become members. Does Bbpress have something similar?

Also, my akismet is not activated. I am using WordPress MU, the Buddypress Magazine theme. They are somewhat integrated. However, when a user signs up via the bbpress forums and not on the main page of the website which is WPMU, that user will not show up in dashboard of the WPMU, only the bbpress listing of users.

If I activate Akismet, will I kill my site?

-j

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

kevinjohngallagher
Member

@kevinjohngallagher

14 years, 6 months ago

Akismet is not great on forums, it catches alot of legitamite posts and marks them as spam. That said, it also catches a good percentage of the spam too.

On one of my forums, 100+ spammer registrations a day is about the norm. One of WordPress and bbPress’s plus sides is it’s easy to register, so there’s alot of automated bots out there.

Not having Akismet activated with the amount of registrations / traffic you’re recieving is probably a bad idea.

Phpbb has a feature where you have to approve a member’s registration before they become members

Thats not built into the core, infact very few moderation abilities are; but I’m sure there’s plugins to enact such functionality. Zaerl had something like that I belive.

I am using WordPress MU, the Buddypress Magazine theme

bbpress is not built to, and does not play well with WPMU.

If you’re using WPMU, I strongly strongly advice BuddyPress instead of bbPress.

They are somewhat integrated

We probably need somewhat more information

jbrzr3
Member

@jbrzr3

14 years, 6 months ago

To switch over to Buddypress would be hard wouldn’t it, or does bbpress have an import/export into for all my members and posts into it?

Tellyworth
Member

@tellyworth

14 years, 6 months ago

Akismet is not great on forums

It can be. Unfortunately the plugins for most forums tend to make questionable API calls, bbPress included, and Akismet is only as good as the data it’s given.

it catches alot of legitamite posts and marks them as spam. That said, it also catches a good percentage of the spam too.

Please send examples to Akismet support – false positive problems are usually easy to fix.

jbrzr3
Member

@jbrzr3

14 years, 6 months ago

@ Tellyworth, well I really want to activate the Akismet plugin. Do I need to be sure that I can first for compatibility reasons? Or should it be okay?

Tellyworth
Member

@tellyworth

14 years, 6 months ago

I don’t know of any problems – your best bet is to try it and test.

kevinjohngallagher
Member

@kevinjohngallagher

14 years, 6 months ago

Hi TellyWorth,

Thanks for popping up.

Please send examples to Akismet support – false positive problems are usually easy to fix.

Mate, that’d be really awesome. Basically every 2-3 days on this forum half my posts are marked as Spam. You’ll notice that if ChrisHajer isn’t on the forums for a day or so that they appear quiet, and when he does come on there’s a host of “rescued from Akismet” posts.

I think you’d get some great examples here by going through bbPress.org

Gautam Gupta
Participant

@gautamgupta

14 years, 6 months ago

Here’s the list – http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abbpress.org%2Fforums+rescued+from+Akismet

chrishajer
Participant

@chrishajer

14 years, 6 months ago

I will start using the tag “rescued” when I release one from the Akismet queue.

https://bbpress.org/forums/tags/rescued

jbrzr3
Member

@jbrzr3

14 years, 6 months ago

Ok, well, If I activate Akismet and it causes a fatal error which destroys my whole site, that would be horrendous.

So, as you know, I now have 400 and counting spammers. How do I block all of them at once? Instead of going through each profile individually?

chrishajer
Participant

@chrishajer

14 years, 6 months ago

Worst case, it kills your site, so you go and delete the plugin with FTP or a shell. No harm done.

To moderate all the users, you’re going to have to access the users in the database directly.

jbrzr3
Member

@jbrzr3

14 years, 6 months ago

Thank you, chrishajer.

jbrzr3
Member

@jbrzr3

14 years, 6 months ago

Ok, so I activated Akismet and put in some other security measures. N

@ chrishajer, how do I rescue posts from akismet? Several legit posts have been caught, but there is no option on the dashboard to rescue them.

Thank yu

chrishajer
Participant

@chrishajer

14 years, 6 months ago

You should have an option to mark posts as “not spam” in the bbPress admin

http://example.com/forums/bb-admin/posts.php?post_text=&forum_id=0&tag=&post_author=&post_status=2&poster_ip=

Go to the admin > posts > then there is a select box where you pull down and select “spam”, then click [filter] and you should have a list of all posts caught by Akismet where you can mark legitimate posts as “no spam”. Do you not have that?