I just tried “Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin” as suggested in another thread, but sadly, the input field does not appear on the forum post pages.
I forgot to mention another issue I’ve had – bbpress doesn’t get along with wp-super-cache – is there any easy way to get around that (disable the cache just for the forums tree for example)?
Oof, the spammers are also gumming up my tags. Is that checked by akizmet?
[blockquote]Does registration go through normal WP reg process? I can’t find it from the forums, but the spam bots sure can![blockquote]
I believe it does so adding something like reCAPTCHA to your reg form should reduce the spam you’re getting on your forum. Something like this: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/ for instance.
[blockquote]If not logged in, I can’t see any way to post to the forum, or any register links in the forum area. Is a setting for this (I have it set at defaults, only registered users can post, and anyone can register), or do I have to add theme support? (I’m using 2011.)[/blockquote]
You can add a link to your template linking to the wp registration page (“url.com/wp-login.php?action=register” or something like that) or simply load the bbpress login widget and add the registration link to it.
[blockquote]I forgot to mention another issue I’ve had – bbpress doesn’t get along with wp-super-cache – is there any easy way to get around that (disable the cache just for the forums tree for example)?[/blockquote]
You can try Hypercache. I believe that plugin allows you to exclude pages you don’t want to cache so you can exclude your forum from being cached.
Very good, thank you for the information.
Another question – if I hit spam on the spammy comments, does that train the Akizmet filter? It does seem that some spam is getting caught, so I’d guess it’s all going through Akizmet?
Also somewhat related (though more generally applicable to WordPress) – anyone know of a good User pruning plugin? The ones I find in the plugin repos don’t seem to work.
I’m getting hit pretty hard by spammers as well, they’re actually registering for accounts, email authenticated, and then spamming about ugg boots.
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.
I did a couple of things to block these (same ugg boots bots).
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.
This happened to us too. BIG TIME.
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.
is there a way to turn off xmlrpc for just the forums? I use it on the main site to post from other sites using xpost. Primarily so that when I do a post at (general geek stuff site) I can crosspost it to (specific geek stuff site) all at the same time.
Why turn off XML-RPC? I have that on (and the Atom publishing protocol) and the steps I mentioned above have stopped the UGG boots spam.
Spam continues to be a problem for us. We are using our own user authentication system, and spammers create bogus accounts. However, we don’t get spam on our WP blog, which does not require authentication. Akismet catches all that.
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.
Dan. Care to update if anything has changed since you pinged the Akismet crew?
Hey John. Sorry just spotted your reply….
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.
Currently our site is running the latest version of BB-Press we have the Akismet plugin activated and running we also have the Stop Spammer Registrations reCAPTCHA plugin for new user registration.
We have in the past tried the reCaptcha for bbPress 2.0 this didn’t make much difference and we couldn’t use this plugin with the spammer registration one so have removed it for now.
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 
Thank you for sharing . Usefull
God damn them!! Is nothing sacred!!!
I wouldn’t mind requiring new registrants to be moderated, or at least new posts. I think post moderation is supported in bbpress v2, isn’t it? What about registrant moderation? I am currently using standalone v1.02.
