Merged How to protect my forum from spam

Very useful thread, thank you.

Forget it by the moment i've installed a captcha in the registration for Joomla to see if this stop, isn't fault of Kunena.

I am getting SPAM in my Kunena Forum. I turned on CAPTCHA but it don't work. Can someone help on this?

The statement "CAPTCHA don't work" could mean many things. If you are saying that you've properly setup Kunena to use reCAPTCHA but you are still getting spam, then there could be a variety of causes. The question you have to deal with is how people may using your site to post spam.

So, let's start with that. Your forum configuration report may provide you (as well as us) a few clues.

Did you read Using CAPTCHA spam protection in Kunena ?

Do you allow guests to post on your forum? We receive the occasional spam posting here at www.kunena.org , too, even with CAPTCHA enabled. You would have noticed that you had to respond to the CAPTCHA challenge, yourself, for the first few messages you posted on the forum at this site. According to any commentary that you may read on the 'net, CAPTCHA is not a proven guarantee to eradicate the possibility of spam. As I have written many times in this topic,

I have had a good look around the documents and the forums and i can't see anything about it (Might be me being blind :blush:) but i have signed up to www.stopforumspam.com and entered the API code to the configuration and just wandered what it does?

Thanks for any help
Ian

Good question. I don't know the answer and I don't know if anyone has written any documentation. Maybe someone should write some documentation when they have the time?

It is a SPAM prevention tool. It is a central database for user accounts that have been flagged as SPAM/BANNED accounts. If one site registers a SPAM/BANNED account for Kunena or another web service, all Kunena installations could be protected from the same SPAM/BANNED account.

Kunena does not recommend or endorse the use of the StopForumSpam API. JoomlaWorks donated the code to help administrators with SPAM issues. It is up to you to register for the service and accept their Terms and Conditions.

Yes i understand it holds a database of known spam emails and usernames... but I don't know how Kunena either uses that database, or adds to that it.

For example i have a forum that has been hit by spam accounts, and i would love it to check all the users against that list, and automatically delete or unpublish the accounts which are in the StopForumSpam database... or does it check that list when a user signs up?

It sounds like it could be an amazing tool, and very useful, but at the moment is useless and a real shame to be ignored.

Currently the implementation is somewhat limited, only sending spam reports to them. I hope that we will have time to improve on it and probably move the implementation to a plugin.

Ahh so if i mark a post as spam, the system fires that users details to StopForumSpam?

Yes it would be a great plugin, separated out... but i also appreciate that it is voluntary work and a huge undertaking