Merged How to protect my forum from spam

For those of you with a general interest in how to protect your forum from spam, although I have written on many occasions before that there really is no substitute for vigilance in dealing with spam on your website, there are a couple of fairly simple things that people can avoid doing to prevent spam.

(1) If you are using K 1.5 you should upgrade to K 1.6. We are not saying that K 1.5 is more "spam-prone" but the toolkit for dealing with spam is not as good as the toolkit included in K 1.6.

(2) If you are using K 1.5 with the unofficial "discussbot" plugin - software that is no longer available on the JED - this software actually can make it easier for spambots to post on your forum because of a security flaw in that software. This is another reason for people who use Kunena to only use add-ons that are endorsed, supported and maintained by the Kunena project team. The K 1.5 "discussbot" was never officially part of the project.

(3) Although K 1.6 is not perfect, it is better than K 1.5 for preventing spam.

(4) If you are worried about the possibility of your site becoming a dumping ground for unwanted rubbish on your website then don't offer people an irresistible invitation by allowing non-registered guests to post on your forum. Certain sites are more attractive than other sites (for some strange reason) such as sites that deal in games, "warez", anime, etc. Don't ask me why, that's just the way things are. This website gets the occasional spam posting but (as far as I know) we have not yet been successfully attached by a spam 'bot.

This is all good advice. However there's little worse than logging on to find loads of explicit porn on the site which has been put up overnight.

I know for a fact that making the first X posts require moderation removes this problem completely and cuts spam appearing on the board to virtually nothing.

Do you think it will be implemented on Kunena? It's by far the best way to stop spam.

I just got a hint that using this component spam was dropped almost into zero -- wihtout captha!

extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-.../authentication/7319

It prevents users from registering by using suspicious or invalid email addresses.

Exactly - but the new 2.0 version is even better: extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-...authentication/10802

After converting one of our sites from Wordpress to Joomla + JomSocial + Kunena, within a few weeks, we we're heavily targeted by spammers.

Every morning I would wake up to ridiculous amounts of russion spam in forum and sometimes more than 100 new spam-users in JomSocial.

I found this, bought it, installed it and haven't had a single spampost, nor spam-user registration, since.

Even though it's a paid/commercial plugin, this is a must-have for us and I will deploy it on all our sites from now on!

Also, support is excellent - I had a question about installation and it was handled very polite and quickly!

The best and most versatile plugin I have found for spam prevention, allowing many different versions of captcha, including an excellent integrated version, and many anti-bot services is EasyCalcCheck Plus ...
It also supports a very wide range of other extensions...

It is absolutely free and for me it has been I life savior...

For those who do not have English forum (or Russian, it seems), there's neat ways to prevent spam. One of those is to ask users very easy question on registration, where only those, who can speak your language, can answer.

Asking what is seven plus three (or a range similar questions) has dropped spam in my site into nothing.

Hey could you advice me how I can protect my forum from this kind of posts

Hi,

I've had two spam topics that show up since upgrading the kunena forum yesterday from 1.5.11 to 1.6.3. Is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening?

Thanks
Kim

Thank, Kim, for your question. I have moved your topic from the Support category and merged it with this one because I think this bigger discussion will probably give you the answers that you're looking for. The other reason that I moved the topic from the Support category is because it is sheer coincidence that there's a relationship between upgrading Kunena and an increase in spam.

I administer about 15-20 websites on the 'net (I'm not sure of the exact numbers) and I'm in a continuing round of updating software on all of those. Some of those sites are spam-free and they usually remain that way because of a range of different strategies that I have implemented. However I can say with a lot of confidence that my forum has very little involvement with a change in the rate of spam that I occasionally encounter.

As I have written many times in this topic:

The only effective remedy against spam is vigilance.

I actually do sympathise with your current situation. There is a lot that you can do to minimise the extent to which you receive nuisance content plastered on your site. This topic has a lot of useful suggestions, hints and ideas and I welcome you to browse through it.

Good luck

1) do not allow guests to post anything
2) install Joomla plugin which makes your registration process safe

There are a lot of options available in:
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security