Merged How to protect my forum from spam

FAN wrote: It's amazing how fast people respond to questions! Fantastic!!! :woohoo:

I just happened to be in the area at the time.

You're welcome!

I just installed this extension, and it works great. The kunena team should take a look at incorporating it into the base system. There are some obvious improvements that it could use, but the basic system is very helful in reducing spam on our forum (which allows guest posts).

kross76 wrote: I just installed this extension, and it works great. The kunena team should take a look at incorporating it into the base system. There are some obvious improvements that it could use, but the basic system is very helful in reducing spam on our forum (which allows guest posts).

Captcha is now part of Joomla 2.5 (turned off by default).

sozzled wrote: proterra: I think you have a different problem ( Spamschutz: Captcha zu schwach ). Please use your own topic or create a new topic, in English, in Kunena Discuss (P) . Make sure you are using the latest version of Kunena and Kunena Discuss plugin and post your configuration report. I think we can help you better if you do that.

No the problem is that guest can post a captcha code (in the forum and the discuss plugin) they want.

Test it on 3 different sites.

Hello all......apologies if this has already been covered elsewhere but I have had no luck in finding the info after a while of trawling through old posts.

I am running version 1.6.0-RC1 but have had to disable registration as the site keeps being invaded by spammers - the vast majority iof which are from the same three IP Addresses. Sometimes they post dozens of pointless topics (mainly a 'company' called AderisPharm) and occassionly it's some weird morbid stuff about child abuse and suicide....all very odd and as you know, extremely disruptive.

I can not see any option to either ban IP Addresses or to activate some kind of filter, eg: Admin needs to authenticate a user/email address prior to them being allowed to commence posting, require a code to be entered etc Do these options exist and if so, where? Failing that, would it require that I load a different version?

The last option then opens up a whole can or wroms though as I am trying to keep expenditure to a minimum having been ripped off to the tune of a few thousand pounds by a rather scrupilous company who I commissoned to originally build the site. Is it easy to upgrade the current version of would it require a proffessional as I'm keen to not lose the posings currently on the forums?

Many thanks in advance and keep up the good work all - this forum is a very valuable tool, so much appreciated.

Hello MonkeyDragon and welcome to Kunena.org my Friend.

There are actually many ways you can block IPs from accessing your website, but the best way to do so is by using the "deny from xx.xx.xxx.x/xx" in your .htaccess file.

If you know how to do this you can greatly reduce the amount of spammers accessing your forums. Another way is to use anyone of these extensions:

extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-...e-access/ip-blocking

Another way is to also add a "CAPTCHA" program during registration. This is through your joomla registration though and I personally use Alpha Registration .

Visit those sites and check them out, if you need any help installing them or with the .htaccess file let me know and I will gladly help you.

Another way is extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-...curity/captcha/11964

Thanks for your responses.....I shall be looking at this in the next couple of days and hopefully bring an end to these damn spammers once and for all!

I really don't understand what gain there is to them, but heyho, I suppose it's 'different strokes for different folks' as they say.

I am new to all this, so please go gently with me if I ask some fairly basic questions! As always, if I can be of any help to others on here then I will share the knowledge.

All the best

K 1.6.0-RC1 is very old but, even if you upgrade to K 1.7.1 the idea of implementing a ban user by IP address was never fully implemented in Kunena. Besides, spammers often use multiple IP addresses and so this approach actually is not 100% foolproof either. Banning by IP address is something that can be achieved by building a plugin - something that was not possible to do during the development of K 1.6/1.7 and I don't think it's something that is necessarily easy to do.

Even so, it's a good idea and if there are other Joomla extensions (or mechanism you can build into your .htaccess file) those are still worthwhile ones to pursue. Sorry, I'm not able to give you any definite solution but I encourage you to upgrade to K 1.7.1 anyway.

As sozzled said, "spammers often use multiple IP addresses" but using .htaccess's "deny from" is by far the best solution I have come across.

Using this method allows you to block not only a single IP address but also a full range which is what spammers do, they stay within a certain range, when they try to access a site and see that their IP has been banned they try a 2nd one, most of the times those IPs are in the range and therefore they either say "screw this" and not try again or if they really want to spam your forums they may use "proxy servers".

I recommend you use the .htaccess method, this is very easy to use and set up if you have cPanel access to your server. If you don't just go to your sites root directory and find the .htaccess file.