Solved Newbie - with several questions!

feste wrote: 4. The website already uses the EasyCalcCheck captcha plugin. Will it be ok to use this or should I use the Kunena's own captcha options?

That's a question I don't feel qualified to answer because I have no experience with EasyCalcCheck . You might like to ask the developer of that extension on his forum which, by the way, is a Kunena forum.

feste wrote: 5. Do I need reCAPTCHA public and private keys? I have no idea what they are! and the same with the API key?

I don't know whether the answer to this question is affected by the answer I gave to earlier. Information about how to use CAPTCHA in Kunena is available in Using CAPTCHA spam protection in Kunena as well as one or two topics posted on the forum.

I hope this helps.

Many thanks sozzled for your very detailed advice. I'm sorry I appear to have caused so much unnecessary work by my incompetent posting. Although I feel I could defend myself against several of your accusations, I am happy to take the 'kicking' as a small price well worth paying for the guidance. I don't work in IT myself, but am the unpaid webmaster for lallans.co.uk where the Kunena forum under discussion is installed. It is a live site on which I am experimenting with the forum and I am keen to avoid/minimize the attentions of spambots. [I know; you think I have done no homework on this but I assure you I have read the FAQ page - and others! - and realize that spambots are a fact of life etc.] But if moderating the thing becomes too onerous it will simply have to be ditched, which would be a shame for all concerned.

Many thanks again for the help.

feste wrote: I ... am the unpaid webmaster ... where the Kunena forum under discussion is installed.

Which is essentially no different to the small group of people who volunteer their time to keep this forum clean and focused on the needs of the community as a whole.

feste wrote: [My site is] ... a live site on which I am experimenting with the forum and I am keen to avoid/minimize the attentions of spambots.

Unfortunately it is a fact of life that some sites attract more attention than other sites.

A little "off-topic", perhaps but, as you opened this wide-ranging subject, you may be interested in learning from some of our experiences.

I have a very small website with four accounts. I do not wnat more than these four accounts. It is a website for testing Kunena. The four accounts are (a) the administrator account, (b) a "normal" unprivileged account, (c) a forum moderator's account and (d) a banned user's account. There is nothing on this site except for the Kunena forum.

There are 6 topics with a total of 41 messages posted on this forum. The first message was posted two months ago and the last message was posted 1 week ago. The messages are a collection of tests to demonstrate that Kunena's features operate; basically it's "me" posting to "myself".

The template is the standard, unmodified Joomla Beez20 template. No-one can join my website without obtaining my permission - in other words, "automatic" registrations have been disabled. I did not submit this website to Google for indexing.

Now that I hope you've gotten the picture - how utterly boring my website is (I'm sure you wouldn't be at all interested) - I receive about 3 emails every day in response to automated attempts to register accounts. In other words, in spite of all reasonable steps I've taken to not "advertise" the existence of this website, someone is interested in the challenge of trying to crash through the site's security.

Once upon a time I used to think that it was mainly a certain genre of websites that attracted spam but the reality is that any website can be the target of spam. Therefore, whether your website is for people who are interested in online gaming, gambling, videos (the areas that attract the most spam) or a site for the academic discussion of the Scottish language (an area that is likely to attract a narrow degree of following), spam can happen anywhere.

I encourage you to read How to protect my forum from spam .

"The only truly effective remedy against spam is vigilance." - sozzled, 25 May 2010

Thanks for the post. I realise, as I said earlier, spammers like taxes are here to stay and your 'dull' websites are illustrative of that fact. Against that, from the ECC+ EasyCalcCheck website [use of which plugin I asked about previously] asserts this.

Tip: This website and all my demo sites did not receive any entries or registrations through spam bots with the following configuration: arithmetic problem, hidden field, time lock and Akismet. If this configuration is not enough, then another spam service can be activated additionally.

Which kind of makes you wonder! I have only very limited experience and knowledge of managing CMS websites but I find it striking how for no apparent reason a 'dull' website such as lallans.co.uk can become a target for spambots seemingly out of the blue generating spam registrations in numbers resembling a plague of locusts of biblical proportions. Hoping to avoid that, I shall do as you advise and study 'How to protect my forum from spam' with interest!

Thanks again.