Merged How to protect my forum from spam

I am having problems with spammers spoiling my site. Is the a way i can set up e mail verification for new joiners like I used to have on Simple Machines?

Oh and hello to all on here!!!

G'day, nellie, and welcome to Kunena.

If you browse through the suggestions, hints, tips and ideas given in this topic you will probably find the answers that you are looking for.

User registration is not handled by Kunena - let's get that out of the way from the very beginning. User registration is a Joomla function that may, or may not, be assisted by third-party registration products (like JomSocial or Community Builder - to mention two). The problem of vetting that users who register on your website are not spammers is older than Kunena, is older than Joomla, is as old as the internet. As I have written on many occasions in the past:

"The only truly effective remedy against spam is vigilance."

The native form of Joomla does not provide a truly efficient mechanism to guard against spam registrations. With Joomla you have two choices: allow everyone to register or allow no-one to register. This isn't much of a choice, is it?

Kunena uses whatever form of registration you have installed on your website.

Currently the kunena registration page only has a few lines of required information. But there is no spam or "type in the letters" to verify type of thing.

Moderator's comment: Moved from K 1.5 Support category

healthlo wrote: Currently the kunena registration page ...

Currently Kunena has no registration page. Let's make sure we understand the facts. Kunena is not responsible for user registration. Joomla is responsible for user registration (or some other third-party extension like JomSocial or Community Builder).

Please look at this discussion topic (from the beginning) for various tips, clues, ideas and suggestions to make your website spam-free. Thank you.

Damn! One account went through AlphaRegistration last night. Lets hope it keeps to the minimal.

I just want to add my 2 cents or so to this thread. Originally when I came to Kunena, I also installed Community Builder. While this was cool and enabled me a lot of options, I decided to remove Community Builder and go back to a simple, plain site. One thing about Community Builder is that no spam got through.

Now that I was back to a Joomla registration component, I immediately started getting spam. Even with any captcha extension installed. So I searched the JED for a better registration component and found AlphaRegistration. I installed it and it works great. Now I was still faced with a problem. Spam bots were still accessing the Joomla registration page. If I typed in the url for the regular Joomla registration, It would go right to it, not AlphaRegistration.

I found on a site how to force the regular Joomla registration to redirect to AlphaRegistration. this way, Spam bots could in no way access it. Hopefully this will hold them off a little better.

If You have AlphaRegistraition installed and face a similar problem, here is my solution.

Open components/com_user/views/register/tmpl/default.php

The top lines will read.

Change that too, providing Your using the core Joomla SEF

Hopefully someone will find this usefull. :woohoo:

Hi guys,

I got a problem - Click Here

You will se that a memeber called Playgirl has left a spam message. Is there anyway of stopping this please? such as the type in image letter thing? or security setting?

Once many thanks again,

Dave

Hi,

you need some 3rd party components or plugin that prevent spam registration in your site. Kunena is not responsable for registration of users.

Regards

Any recommendations as in any that are compatable with Kunena 1.6? as I didnt get this problem with my ccboard forum

Many thanks

Dave

RE:
<?php // no direct access
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access');
$mainframe->redirect('../alpharegistration/register');
?>

love it top man. I installed alphaplug which is a great add on, I ensured bot search and recapture, but I knew that this was the weakness. Thanks for solving it. As nobody was ever actually visiting the site I knew they weren't clicking on the confirmation link, therefore, I knew they were somehow skipping the whole process - bots obviously. This should resolve it.

Top man What's your site?