Hi,

i am really desperate, for some A… floated our music schools website forum with 34.000 entries, running on bbpress alongside with buddypress. It is not only crap and makes it almost impossible for real users to find one of the few real-human-posts, it is spooky that someone take over the forum. I was trying to delete all those posts, but this leads to a server 500 error.

I have de- an reactivated bbpress, un- and reinstalled it, but the messages are still there. Is there any way to get rid of this annoying stuff? I would love to keep forum and group functionality, but with this entries in the forum, it is almost useless. Can be found at http://www.musikzentrale.net/musikerservice/forum/musikersuche/band-sucht-musiker/

What i have done so far:
– delete user (which would be a pretty elegant solution): did not make sense in my case, since the posters are no users of musikzentrale.net.
– mass deleting themes (tried 10, 50, 100, 500 posts at a time) from the back up ended up in error message stating, that the URL was too long.
– trying to delete the respective forum leads to a 500 server error or in some cases to “URL too long” (I am running this site on a managed server with all software up to date)
– finally i tried to access the respecting tables via phpmyadmin, but apparently it has got that big, that even after several minutes the table was not loaded, so i interrupted this attempt.

At least i could prevent further entries in the two respective foren by using a math captcha and let only registered users to open new themes or respond to older ones, but obviously the DB is that huge, that it is killing the site`s formerly pretty fast loading time.

Some infos about technical environment:
– WP, bbpress and all Plugins running on there latest Version
– all other features and plugins behave as they are supposed to
– site is protected with AIOWPS and Siteguarding plugin
– WP theme is enfold without any issues so far (using the combination since April 2013)
– all running on a managed server with 512 mb of RAM for WP
– bbpress version 2.5.8, buddypress 2.4.0

Thanks for your kind assistance.

Best regards, Sebastian.

[@robkk Moderator 9 years, 1 month ago]

At least i could prevent further entries in the two respective foren by using a math captcha and let only registered users to open new themes or respond to older ones

From what I am reading on your post, you had anonymous posting activated and without spam protection even, which is the reason why there are a lot of spam posts on your forums. Having anyone to post on forums even without an account to your site will allow spammers to just wreck havoc. And from visiting your site I can tell most of the posts are from users without an account posting on your forums.

I have de- an reactivated bbpress, un- and reinstalled it, but the messages are still there.

Doing that doesn’t delete your posts.

Since I see that there are a few posts from 2013 here and there, then most of the spam posts seem to come around October, you may need to suggest a nuclear option and possibly just delete all your bbPress forum post data in whole and start over. I am only suggesting this as i can see about 3 legitimate topics in a forum, then everything else was spam. To delete all of bbPress posts and data you have to follow this guide here and run the Reset Forums Tool. While trying to run this, tell me if it stalls up and gives you an error.

Deleting bbPress

If you have a backup of your database dating back before all the spam wrecked havoc, you can also restore that and be fine, but you will possibly lose some new data like new blog posts that you might of have created.

If you do not make regular backups, make sure after the forum data is cleaned up, that you start doing so.

Remember that when you are starting a forum, you will need to have some kind of spam protection in your forums from the start, especially if you are allowing people to post without an account. Also make sure to have some moderators on your site to catch any activity as it happens.

Dealing with Spam

[@mirzepapa Participant 9 years, 1 month ago]

hi Rob,

thanks you so much for your answer. I was hoping to avoid the nuclear strike, but it was the only solution to get rid of all the rubbish – and to start the community from scratch with a solid security foundation.

Some work ahead, but i am shure, the better result will be worht it.

Cheers, I have to drop a bomb now 😉

Sebastian.

[@robkk Moderator 9 years, 1 month ago]

Alright I see you have your forums cleaned up already. If you need any more help or have questions about stopping spam in general, post your questions here.