Sticky How to protect my forum from spam

*** Topics merged by moderator ***

G'day, mac123, and welcome to the forum.

We are sympathetic to the issue of any web-based discussion forum being attacked by Xrumer (and other badly-behaving web agents) and Kunena is not more nor any less susceptible to such attacks.

This topic contains many ideas that people have used (with varying degrees of success) to counter such attacks by spam merchants. I am sure that you will find suggestions and possible solutions to your problem by browsing the pages in this topic.

In the first instance it is a must that you should attempt to prevent the source of spam by employing tighter controls around the user registration procedure. As mentioned many times in this forum , Kunena is not responsible for user registration. I hope that some of the information you will find in this topic will assist you.

I used to note the IP address of the spam message and include its inetnum range in the black list of the plug-in "Ban IP Address and Range".
Today the IP address is still not shown by Kunena. The plug-in seems not maintained anymore. So I gave up on that strategy.
Since some time I use the EasyCalcCheckPLUS plug-in. I include a small arithmetic test to differentiate humans from robots. I also use the black list of StopForumSpam.com, which you can activate from EasyCalcCheckPlus.
Since the I have no more trouble with spammers (keep fingers crossed).

I received a reply from DebraR to say that her problem has been fixed.

we've seen the same problem lately on a couple of sites through the com_contacts extension - had to change the captcha system from ReCaptcha to AreYouaHuman. That seemed to stop them cold.

I've also been really impressed with areyouahuman.

I was getting up to about 1-200 spam registrations a day (this was with J1.5 before I could use a captcha with registration) and anywhere from a few to a dozen or more posted to the forum (which had email confirmation and first post recaptcha which many of them seemed to be able to crack). Since I migrated to J2.5 and added areyouahuman to the forum registration I haven't had a single successful spam registration much less a spam forum post in the two months or so I've been using it.

Phoenix

straetch wrote: I used to note the IP address of the spam message and include its inetnum range in the black list of the plug-in "Ban IP Address and Range".
Today the IP address is still not shown by Kunena. The plug-in seems not maintained anymore. So I gave up on that strategy.
Since some time I use the EasyCalcCheckPLUS plug-in. I include a small arithmetic test to differentiate humans from robots. I also use the black list of StopForumSpam.com, which you can activate from EasyCalcCheckPlus.
Since the I have no more trouble with spammers (keep fingers crossed).

Same experience with EasyCalcCheckPlus, a very good plug-in it gets the job done