Sticky How to protect my forum from spam

Have you tried using Cloudflare? The basic plan is free, and if you had not known, Cloudflare keeps a record of spammers, and forces captcha.

Here's a clip from their security page:

Adjust the basic security level to modify CloudFlare's protection behavior relative to which visitors are shown a captcha/challenge page. A low security setting will challenge only the most threatening visitors. A high security setting will challenge all visitors that have exhibited threatening behavior within the last 14 days. Essentially off will act only against the most grievous offenders. We recommend starting out at low.

I'm Under Attack Mode should only be used when a site is having a DDoS attack. Visitors will receive an interstitial page for about five seconds while we analyze the traffic and behavior to make sure it is a legitimate human visitor trying to access your site.

We use community builder for user profiles and have Admin approval for each new user. Recently turned on the email verification during registration and it has cut the false registrations to zero.

How to protect the forum from spam, don't let the bots in to start with.

Hello.

I have exactly the same problem, but with the difference that my version of Joomla is 1.5.26.

I have confirmed that the user IP is in the database.

Did you get to fix the problem?

Regards.

Hello,

I'm new to Kunena and need help with my forum. I've been fighting spammers non-stop for the past 6 hours. I have captcha, I've even turned off the forum yet they are still able to register. They can no longer post however.

What's the deal? Is there someone out there that can help me with better security. I used to be able to ban IPs in my old forum, but don't see that is is an option.

Please contact me via e-mail if you think you can help. corgimom515@ yahoo dot com

Replied by email

Hi everyone, My forum has been attacked by xrumer spam post. I have enabled recaptcha in the com_login / registration process and have added the stopforumpost API too in the kunena forum backend but those spamers are still able to post spam to the forum.
Any idea how to get rid of this?

Anyway how can I enable recaptcha for registered users just like this forum? In my forum, seems like the recaptcha function can be disabled for non registered user only

I use joomla 2.5.11, Kunena 2.0.4

Thanks alot