Our forum at http://www.openfl.org has been under attack from spam bots :frowning: What once was a quiet hamlet became pages and pages of spam. We now have discourse-akismet installed, the good news is it properly detects incoming new spam whenever it runs. With great effort, we deleted all of the …

@DeanMarkTaylor Thanks for the code snippet :smile: We had tried Trust Level 0 (we use Trust Level 1 by default) but had not seen improvements. Seeing that Akismet is triggered in this way (should it be first number of posts instead?) is helpful I like Trust Level 1 better because it has been comm…

[image] singmajesty: I like Trust Level 1 better because it has been common for legitimate users to sign up for the first time just to share screenshots I’ve asked this question before @codinghorror kindly pointed me toward the newuser max images setting allowing you to change the maximum ima…

As @deanmarktaylor noted, just edit the setting to allow 1 image per new user. if you make TL1 the default without some kind of external vetting (paid accounts, or SSO) you will be in a world of hurt and suffering pretty quickly.

I updated my earlier post with final stats. Ok phase 1 of improvements here are going out. I want to be coy about the specifics because spammers but you can read commit logs for today and yesterday to get more detail. We should be much more resistant to casual 100% human spamming now, as well as a…

Have these improvements been applied to Stable as well, or do we have to be on Beta to get them? Our forum which is on the 1.3.x Stable might be getting hit by bamwar spam as well now (I haven’t looked into it closely enough yet to say that for sure), and I’m just wondering if the pseudo-secret prot…

No, all the magic is in 1.4, you should be running beta :slight_smile: you are hard core beta is super safe

With TL0 and Akismet enabled, I am happy to report that spam has gone down (and all but disappeared) However, I got a user response that they received a message “Akismet has temporarily hidden your post as potential spam.” There is nothing on my end that I see that I can use to unblock his post …

Sounds like you are not logged in as staff? There should be a red circle with a number on it over the menu drop down at upper right.

I remember an option being available before, it disappeared after a recent update (without about 18 commits to Discourse and 1 commit to Akismet, I believe) [image]

Our forum is getting "bamwar" spam

Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) August 13, 2015, 1:24am 23

On 1.3 your options are Akismet. But you should be on 1.4 anyway, all our customers are.

Please don't pressure self-installers to be on Beta branch

Topic		Replies	Views
Diagnosing spam attack of 100 topics Feature	34	3074	May 29, 2017
Blocking recent wave of spam Support	20	852	July 29, 2025
Lots of Spam New User Registrations? Support	42	5921	April 7, 2020
Need assistance with massive amounts of spam Support	13	1923	June 10, 2023
Stop Forum Spam - Spam Countermeasures Feature completed	21	13411	June 22, 2019

Our forum is getting "bamwar" spam

Related topics