Sticky How to protect my forum from spam

As I have written on numerous occasions, "the only effective remedy against spam is vigilance". You can "relax" but you should always be on your guard. You should be always vigilant but that doesn't mean that you should be paranoid. It's not the end of the world if someone posts a piece of spam on your website. The priority for you should be how to manage an acceptable level of that risk.

Some websites seem to attract more spam than others. Websites that involve online games, underground software distribution, anime, music and websites managed in certain parts of the world that lie outside of the tougher regulation that is imposed in most of the world ... these kinds of sites seem to be favoured by site crackers and spam merchants. Even Kunena.org is not immune to the occasional attempts at web vandalism. However you won't see too many successful spam postings here because of the vigilance of the moderation team.

See below, install Alpharegistration and follow the instructions.

Since that day I have had zero spam, zero dud registrations, and 100% more time and happiness Ok my sites not mega busy (but it was before this spamspamspam), and it's Christmas, so no sites are mega busy, but hey. The spambots never sleep right? And it's stopped it, so I'm happy to recommend it. In fact tomorrow I will write a review on the Alphareg one to do that guy a favour for his good work.


=============QUOTE========== (from earlier in this post)
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. www.alphaplug.com/index.php/products/alpharegistration.html

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.

<?php // no direct access
defined('_JEXEC') or die('Restricted access'); ?>



Change that too, providing Your using the core Joomla SEF

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



Hopefully someone will find this usefull.

I have another non-Kunena forum which is pretty big. We used to have a lot of spam problems but simply by making the first X posts from new users having to be moderated has cut it to 0. No spam at all on it.

Why? Well every so often a new user joins and tries to post some spam and we simply junk it and ban the user. Simple as that.

In my opinion it's the best possible way to go about thing and something I'd love to see on Kunena. It would make my life a lot easier on the Kunena forums I run!

I tried to search so sorry if I missed it and it's elsewhere.
I just downloaded Kuena and am new to it and Joomla so excuse the ignorance.

I'm getting people signing up for the forum just to spam

How do I make it harder for them to sign up?

Can I make specific questions relevant to my site that they would have to answer and make them be approved my the administrator?

I'm sure these are answered out there somewhere but for the life of me I can't find them. If anyone can help out it'd be much appreciated!!

Yes this spamming problem seem to increase and i hope the Kunena team will be able to add some feature that helps in that regards.

I like the idea of being able to moderate the first X amount of post of a new user.

I also have a lot of spam that comes to my forum, and i'm a bit tired to monitor closely and disable users. It's such a waste of time and counter productive.

The major problem that we see now, is that spams are no longer ONLY posted by bots. Since internet is now reaching very poor part of the world, you have people paid for doing so.
I know it can sound crazy right? how much can you be paid to do that? but think about people in some part of the world are making a few dollars a month. So getting paid to sit your ass and spam forum and site is probably attractive for them.

This is why even captcha system are starting to be no longer enough.

Welcome to globalization!

I am a newbie to Kunena.
I have just got my new forum up and running, but for one night I have already 300 spammers registreded on the forum.
How can I avoid this.
Is it possible to have some kind of extra security.
Br
Nile