How to block a spam attack?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

CamilleRoux reports a spam attack on their Discourse forum, where spammers create new accounts to post multiple messages. They seek advice on how to stop it. strager suggests installing the Akismet plugin, which CamilleRoux does and finds effective, blocking spam immediately. zogstrip and codinghorror confirm Akismet as a reliable solution, noting its Bayesian filtering and limitations against human spammers. codinghorror also mentions ongoing challenges with Korean spam and plans for language-specific site settings, which sam confirms are being added to Discourse 1.8.

1

Hi,

Since this morning, my Discourse is under a spam attack. They create a new account and post 5 messages.
I delete the spammer each time, but since they continue to create new accounts, I don’t know what to do.

Here the spams, maybe some of you get the same:

Capture d’écran 2015-07-21 à 16.29.27.png1698×1412 577 KB

Thank you for your help

2

Do you have askimet installed/configured?

3

No, how can I do that?

Edit: I found the discourse-askimet plugin. Should I install this version?
https://github.com/discourse/discourse-akismet

4

That’s the one unless there’s another version somewhere… it’s pretty straightforward from what I saw- as our site isn’t live yet I can’t attest to its effectiveness, but others I’ve spoken to have had nothing but praise for it.

Let me know how it goes - We’ve been hit by a Bamwar (on our old forum) in the past and it gets quite annoying to clean up after…

5

Ok thanks,
I found no mention of this plugin on this forum. Can someone give me some feedback on it?

6

Akismet is the reference when it comes to spam. It takes a bit to learn about the content of your site, but once it’s rolling, it’s awesome.

Do you see much spam on meta? :wink:

7

To be clear, these are human beings, so they will easily bypass any Capcha. You need the official Akismet plugin to block them based on Bayesian content filters.

(Can also block by IP, but they have a lot of IPs…)

8

I just installed the Akismet plugin and it already blocked the first spam :smile:
Thanks !

PS: I’m translating the plugin into French

10

The Korean bamwar human spammers are still around and still pernicious enough to be effective even with fast typist and Akismet checking and new user post limits and IP limits. @sam will add language specific site settings (we need this for all uppercase checks and other stuff anyway) to make sure the common thread of Korean text is a huge red flag for a new user post.

11

This is something that comes up a fair bit, I am adding the feature to the 1.8 list