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 …

Ouch - getting hit with a Bamwar is never fun :frowning: - this can go on for days… [image] @sam - is there any way to adjust the settings on Akismet to be more effective against this kind of spam? We’ve had a number of bamwar “campaigns” hit our forums over the years and they are a real pain to…

I’d like to know this too - Our existing xenForo install gets a fair amount of spam signups/threads every day and I’d like to have that problem go away when we move to Discourse at the end of August. Does Akismet not scan every post as its made?

Akismet has helped tremendously to fight the “wake up to tons of spam on the forums” problem You see in the image that @strager took that within the 10 minute window (before the “CheckForSpam” job is run) it continues to pile up. We have temporarily disabled new user registrations – certainly not a…

[image] singmajesty: We have temporarily disabled new user registrations That seems overly drastic. Wouldn’t a better initial measure be to require approval-by-moderator for all first-time posts?

It looks like Trust Level 0 users are checked faster than every 10 minutes… … what Trust Level are the default for your new users? plugin.rb main require_relative "jobs/regular/check_akismet_post.rb" require_relative "jobs/regular/check_akismet_post_v…

Instead of disabling new user signups, try using the “approve post count” setting. Set it to 1 so you have to review the first post from every new user before it appears.

Have you manipulated trust defaults or other Discourse new user settings? New users are strictly rate limited so once you add Akismet to check for human spammers (which these are) you should not have a problem. Also trust level 0 users are required to pass through Akismet before posting. We also re…

I just cleaned up a bamwar on talk.commonmark.org so I have info. Here are the accounts that were used: ariel122iori@gmail.com dlcjsghk4@gmail.com argie121ikuya@gmail.com alchemy1236emori@gmail.com mingoksong@gmail.com antook1316ikuei@gmail.com aagaard1165akashi@gmail.com aakre1167akifumi@gmail.co…

[image] codinghorror: @gmail.com Hmm, maybe someone found a way to bot Google account signups, sold a batch of “clean” accounts to the spammers, and the spammers were using the Google OAuth to sign in without going through the email confirmation. Yeah, looks like these guys love Google accou…

Our forum is getting "bamwar" spam

Support

riking (Kane York) July 30, 2015, 5:22pm 4

Should we add a “delete spam” bulk action? So you could clean it all up from the topic list.

Topic		Replies	Views
Diagnosing spam attack of 100 topics Feature	34	3008	May 29, 2017
Blocking recent wave of spam Support	20	786	July 29, 2025
Lots of Spam New User Registrations? Support	43	5789	April 30, 2024
Need assistance with massive amounts of spam Support	14	1802	June 10, 2023
Stop Forum Spam - Spam Countermeasures Feature completed	22	13302	December 3, 2025

Our forum is getting "bamwar" spam

Related topics