The IDX Community is experiencing a spam attack despite having the Akismet plugin enabled. kirupa has manually deleted over 1000 spam posts and is seeking help to resolve the issue.
kirupa notes that the spammers all have a trust level of t l0, which should be flagged by Akismet by default. Moin suggests that the issue might be related to the default trust level site setting or the tl1 requires site settings, which could be excluding users from Akismet.
After adjusting the settings to remove tl1 and adding the moderator/admin team, kirupa believes the spammers should be flagged by Akismet. However, David_Ghost and Moin clarify that the skip akismet groups setting only excludes users in the listed groups.
kirupa then asks if there is a way to hide flagged posts until a moderator reviews them. HAWK provides a link to helpful tips for preventing spam, including the hiding of posts threshold.
Finally, kirupa asks for a fast way to bulk delete/remove over 400 flagged items, after implementing some of the suggested tips to catch most of the spam.
Hi everyone - on the IDX Community, we have the Akismet plugin enabled, but it is failing to stop a spam attack:
I have manually deleted (and flagged/blocked) over 1000 posts over the past few hours. The posts do seem to be getting flagged:
What am I doing wrong? I have checked my settings (this is part of a Discourse Hosted setup), and the plugin is enabeld.
(FWIW, this same attack on my personal forums was successfully blocked by Akismet)
Thanks,
Kirupa
Did you change the default trust level site setting or change any of the tl1 requires site settings?
That way users can be excluded from Akismet, because by default the skip akismet groups includes all users with trust level 1 and above.
I didn’t change the default settings there, but I just changed it to remove tl1 and adding our moderator/admin team instead:
When I looked at the trust level of the spammers, they are all in **tl0**.:
My guess would be that they would all be flagged by akismet anyway even though the default settings were in **tl1**.
So, it’s skipping posts from tl0, tl1,2,3,4, in this case
Are you sure? The description says “Don’t submit posts to Akismet if the user is in any of these groups” Why should tl0 users be skipped if that group isn’t added to the setting?
That is my understanding as well. The groups that are listed will be omitted from being flagged by Akismet.
To change this question a bit, Akismet does flag some posts as spam:
Is there a way to tell Discourse to hide these posts until a moderator has reviewed them? Today, the post is flagged BUT it also appears for everyone.
Thanks,
Kirupa
There are a few other helpful tips at Tips for Preventing Spam (including the hiding of posts threshold) which might be useful.
@HAWK - thanks. We implemented a lot of those items, and that is now catching most of the spam.
Hopefully last question. There are over 400 items flagged for review from the last few hours. Is there a fast way to bulk delete/remove all of these?
