Sticky How to protect my forum from spam

I have had a significant attack on one of our sites that uses Kunena.

This attack, being mounted by Bots originating mainly from China, has been able to persuade Kunena to forward spam emails, effectively allowing Kunena to act as an open relay, although spam emails are being forwarded using the site admin username rather than redirected.

I am working through how this exploit functions and will update, but if others have noticed this same effect, which started for me around 22nd June 2013, I would be interested to know.

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

If you read this topic (and elsewhere on the forum), some people have laid claim that the reason their websites have become clogged with spam or spambot behaviour is entirely due to the presence of Kunena.

It was not that long ago that I wrote in this topic:

We are sympathetic to the issue of any web-based discussion forum being attacked by [various badly-behaved web agents] and Kunena is not more nor any less susceptible to such attacks [than any other web-based discussion forum].

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.

If you know which account is being used to spuriously send emails from your server, then it is a relatively straightforward matter to ban the account. If you have other evidence to substantiate the claim that [any version of] Kunena is somehow culpable in being used to act as a relay point for spam email generation, we would be grateful to know of such evidence.

Do you have any other information about what kind of web agents are responsible for this behaviour that you're reporting?

So I got a really annoying problem. As we all know there are still some retarded people out there that think that spamming 1000s of sites out there using bots will make them rank better in google, so thats what they do.

Now I quickly figured out how to shut them out, replacing the default captcha with a different one.

But the main problem is that the bots keep thinking, that they posted something, and keep building 100s of bad links to my site every day. Im at about 50k links form really low-quality places all over the web.

95% of those links point to:
ROOT/forum/newtopic

What can I do to stop this. The bots are not able to sign up, but they still keep building shitty links to my site... WHY???

I'm quite afraid that all these thousands of bad backlinks are going to hurt my SEO.

I'm quite sure it has something to do with the structure of Kunena. I never had this problem with other joomla extensions, phpbb, vbulletin, Fireboard and other boards.

Thanks for everything
Kunena is awesome!

//edit:
I know that they are XRUMER, because one of them was advertising XRUMER^^

*** Topics merged ***

G'day, XRUMERbot, and welcome to Kunena.

Kunena is no more or less susceptible to attacks from XRumer than any other web-based discussion forum on the internet.

Is Kunena software designed to produce spam ?

Do you have evidence that Kunena produces spam? :huh: