Merged How to protect my forum from spam

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

We moved our site from Wordpress to Joomla with JomSocial and Kunena.

After that, we get a lot fo spam - several spam/porn/pills post every day now. :pinch:

What is the best way to manage this ?

It would be really nice to have the first post from new users kept for moderation so that they would not be able to post before having at least one good post.

Definitely not a Kunena expert (installed it today), but generally if you have a web developer who could make some adjustments to the forum registration process (registration page), you could ask them to:

1. add some non-standard mandatory field to the registration page that has to be filled in (random question etc., which should be enough to confuse the spam bot and reject it at the doorstep)
2. delay the timer for your forum account activation prompt e-mail response (anything that is different from immediate response should work here)
3. disable the option to place any do follow links at the registration process (that is in user signature etc.)

I suppose that these are not "out of the box" solutions for this extension, but if you know a knowledgeable person, they should be able to implement them. Other than that (but this would also need some help from a programmer when it comes to implementation) subscribing to spam blacklists and blocking IPs that are on those lists from access to your website should be of some help here too.

klp29 wrote: It would be really nice to have the first post from new users kept for moderation so that they would not be able to post before having at least one good post.

That's a very good idea. Maybe we should consider this as a feature inclusion for a future version of Kunena?

Can someone tell me how can i stop spam bots to post on my forum?

Hello,

You need to use a captcha system, what kunena version are-you using ?

My page content is of no interest for Russian, Ukraine or Lithuanian visitor, but Joomlastats tells me that 30-40% of my visitors are from these countries. This visitors almost ALWAYS visits 6 pages. The registration page is visited one time, the "forgot password" page is visited 2-3 times, and the Forum index 2-3 times.
OS is almost always WinXP, and IE 6.0 is used.

Before I installe AlphaRegistration, all these visitors registered, but they never activated the account. After AlphaReg no one of these registers, but they still follow the same pattern of visiting 6 pages.

Can anyone tell me what this is? Is it some kind of security risk here? Should I do something, or should I just forget about it?

G'day, gugne, and welcome to Kunena.

It is a fairly well-established fact that many attempts by people to infiltrate legitimate websites originate from the places that you have found. It is most unfortunate that there is not as much policing done in those areas to stamp out these unwarranted attacks. However, the mere fact the people have tried to worm their way into your website is not, of itself, any more of a risk that, say, crossing a busy road. There is always traffic that you have to watch out for.

But, as far as Kunena is concerned, this is not really a Kunena problem. This is a website administration problem. I am pleased to read that you have taken appropriate steps to minimise the risk. It's good to see people watching the busy road before they try to cross it.

Why do you see the same "six pages" visited, time after time? Most probably these are not real people trying to hack into your website. They're 'bots - automated software that hunts for potential targets to hit. In your case they've tried but failed to gain entry. Good. Let's keep things that way.