Sticky How to protect my forum from spam

A short update - SpamFighter automatically blocked more than 8,000 spammy posts in only the last 3 weeks. That's insanely awesome!

But as Baijianpeng wrote, a big concern should be how spambots managed to solve 8,000 Recaptchas? Either Recaptcha is completely pointless, or there is some bug in Kunena's implementation of Recaptcha that enables spambots to bypass the Recaptcha check somehow.

Somehow I can't believe that Recaptcha is broken quite that easily, since it is so widely used on the net.

Any thoughts from Kunena devs on this whether the blame should lie with Recaptcha? Or, if any spammers are reading this and are having an attack of conscience - how the hell do you manage to spam us so with stupid posts about Christian Laboutin, Adidas sneakers and other crap???

Interesting topic. I've wondered the same thing and had the same experience. I think clearly they've hacked recaptcha, since I think Kunena just links to that service without any control over it.

A few points to think about:

There is a whole business that's making money out of solving CAPTCHA challenges. There are actually "sweat-shops" in third-world countries where people are being paid for this service.

There are many black-hat applications available to spammers to use to register themselves, post their rubbish and move on to the next site.

There's an implication here that Kunena is weak or somehow enables people to spam. Those assertions are not proven. If they were established fact, perhaps someone would be good enough to explain the remarkable absence of spam on this website?

Spammers are drawn to "attractive" sites - sites that figure prominently in the major search engines. If your site is in one of the "attractive" categories then you will probably find yourself hit by attempts to spam your site at some time or another.

Everyone wants the "silver bullet" - the universal panacea, "spamicide", the global elimination of spam. I would like world peace, free beer and never having to say "I'm sorry", too. I think we have to be realistic about our dreams.

There are anti-spam products and anti-spam measures available. Some are better than others and not all of them are completely effective. Some anti-spam products may even prevent legitimate messages being posted on your forum or may prevent legitimate email arriving in your inbox to advised you that, yes, you did in fact win $10 in the lottery!

I want to prevent posts containing the spammers link to a stupid handbag-site. I've checked the documentation and the configuration but can not find how to set this up. Am I overlooking something or do I need a plugin to do this?

I use Forum Protection for a long time, I am very satisfied with it, Plugin have a lot of features like , badwords, url filter and work fine with Kunena 2.x
I do not want to be seen as a spammer or advertiser, so I will not post the link, but you can easily find the plugin in JED

Hi,
from some days I have bot registration and posts. I've updated both kunena and recaptcha, deleted bot users and checked captcha on registration form, but no success.

I've a Joomla 2.5.6 installation with kunena 2.0.2 and recaptcha 2.5.0.

Any hint on how to find where bot register themselves (and fixing the problem) would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance...