This codex article is quite comprehensive about how to fight SPAM. (https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started/forum-moderation/dealing-with-spam/)

However, although it acknowledges profile SPAM, it fails amongst the many solutions to actually identify a method that is targeted at battling profile SPAM. You could switch to manual registration approval (which would be a pain in any moderate to high traffic site), but that would not solve the problem since the approved user can still post links in their profile.

Akismet, WangGuard, etc, appear to only work on post/comment spam, not on profile spam, no?

I don’t even have discussions enabled or commenting enabled so I don’t even care about post/comment spam!

So as far as I can tell there is no plug-in or feature that will prevent profile SPAM. Someone please tell me I’m wrong!

[@mth75 Participant 7 years, 11 months ago]

Use Cleantalk, I use it on my own site WP/Buddypress/Buddyboss site … almost 100% reliable.

[@netweb Keymaster 7 years, 11 months ago]

There would be two parts to this, the first I think sounds easy enough, when a user updates their profile we submit the updated user bio/description to Akismet. The second part of this is the “management” side, what to do with the profile if it fails the Akismet check 🤔

With topics and replies, in bbPress we have a new “pending” post status, similar to the “spam” post status for topics and replies awaiting some moderator action. I wouldn’t want (due to Akismet false positives) to automatically mark a user as a “spam user” solely from the Akismet response, we’d want the user flagged for follow up by a moderator or keymaster.

Anyone else have some thoughts on the workflow and how w should approach this?