Solved Im New to Kunena and getting spam everyday. Need Help configuring.

Hi all, I've recently installed Kunena on my website and love its functionality, the only problem is Im getting spam, and its getting worse.

Are there recommendations or some sort of cheat sheet to follow to stop these bad guys/robots?

Im not much of a webmaster, just a hobbyist (my website would explain)

Ok, any help appreciated.

Joomla and Kunena 3
Used Guitars.co

Kunena has no own registration. Joomla and Kunena users are the same. The registration takes about Joomla. You need to prevent spambots can register on your page.
For registration you can use the Captcha - ReCaptcha plugin for Joomla (it requires a Google account for the key).
You can also try other extensions. For example: github.com/joomlaworks/Akismet-For-Kunena or joomla-extensions.kubik-rubik.de/ecc-easycalccheck-plus

used guitars wrote: Hi all, I've recently installed Kunena on my website and love its functionality, the only problem is I'm getting spam, and its getting worse.

Are there recommendations or some sort of cheat sheet to follow to stop these bad guys/robots?

Following on from a similar topic that you started recently, I am writing an article that summarises some approaches I have used to combat spam. It will take some time—a couple of days, I imagine—to write what I have in mind but the discussion about spam (and the ways you can combat it) is always a "work in progress". The discussion about spam (and the methods you can use with Kunena) does not seem to end.

I am happy to discuss my thoughts at any time with anyone who is serious about how to combat spam. It is difficult to summarise everything that people can do in a discussion forum (for example, the topic How to protect my forum from spam contains a lot of useful information although it will take people an hour or more to wade through it) but there is no harm in starting here.

There are a few configuration settings in Kunena you can use. There are also other methods you can use use around Kunena to minimise the level of spam. Although I do not get any spam in the websites I manage—whether it is through luck or good management, I cannot say—stopping spam is not solely a Kunena issue nor is it preventable solely via the way you configure it.

Hi, I have very good experience with r-antispam . It is a free component that in my case catches 99.99% of all spam messages. I use it on all my websites that have Kunena installed

I am still in the process of writing my article about how to prevent spam in Kunena. Although products like R Antispam have a fairly good reputation, they are not totally spam-proof. There is actually a lot more that you can do without using these products by taking a few simple precautions.

I am not saying that R Antispam is worthless—it's free and, like everything else that's free, you get what you pay for. But if there was a proven, 100% reliable anti-spam forum product available—free or otherwise—why haven't the administrators at this website used it?

I hope to have my article finished in the next couple of days.

sozzled wrote: I am not saying that R Antispam is worthless—it's free and, like everything else that's free, you get what you pay for. But if there was a proven, 100% reliable anti-spam forum product available—free or otherwise—why haven't the administrators at this website used it?

I once learned way back that when you wanted to have a secure server, the only way to have that was to shut it off...
Same applies for spam I guess: no matter what you do to prevent and as long as somebody sees business in it, spam will get through.

Seeing the amount of spam messages posted lately on the Kunena forum I often wonder why they do not use r-antispam? Is it because they never heard of it, tried it but it broke down the system? Impacts performance? Is unsecure?

Even moderate spam protection is better then none

Maybe just ask the question: Why not?

ps Sozzled. Looking forward to your guide, maybe a good idea to post it here and have people add their best practises to it?

Thanks to all that responded, I will do more research on this topic and try to follow advice that everyone gave.

Appreciate it.

I hope this article helps you: How to stop forum spam in Kunena

Hi, sozzled.
I am the developer of R-Antispam.
I am not here to say this is the best antispam solution, but I would like to state that there is an option in component configuration to remove the advertisement.

As a matter of fact, for some time I had the plan to set this option to remove the back link by default. I guess I forgot to do it, I will now.
Also, despite your advices sites are still goint to receive a lot of spam. I have learned that the best solution is to check users registrations against online spammers databases, such as stopforumspam and akismet. This is the option that most antispam tools plugins.
First R-antispam version used a heuristic method to detet spam text, and it prevented spam pretty good, although it used to missed some and sometimes detected false positives.
Then I tried checking users name and emails at akismet. Right now I can say my site is 100% spam free. You will need, however, an akismet key.

I have noticed a "Stop Forum Spam Configuration" at Kunena settings. I guess it should be worth trying this.