[Dan Milward]

We still have a problem with spam and bbPress. We’re still getting 40+ spam posts a day. We have tried quite a few things to get rid of this problem but nothing seems to be working.

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?

[Anointed]

I can relate. I setup a demo site that was not published anywhere. It was basically just my dumping bin to try code in. It got to the point of 500+ spam posts a day so I finally just deleted it.

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.

[Dan Milward]

Would you consider making that as a Plugin?

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

[Dan Milward]

Sigh…

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…

[Dan Milward]

We’ve made what you described into a Plugin. At least a good chunk of it – will keep you posted

[Dan Milward]

Hi guys,

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

[John James Jacoby]

Awesome. Very cool.

[David Decker]

You should also try this great free plugin: “bbPress Antispam”

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-antispam/

It works similar to the awesome “Antispam Bee”:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/antispam-bee/

Greetinx, Dave