unfortunately, we have no control over how akismet works…  you would need to talk with Automattic on that one…

you mention ban user, so you have the sp ban plugin?  but you say ban user…  have you looked at his IPs?  are they all over the map or somewhat the same?  can you ban by ip ranges with wildcards if needed… 

We need more options when deleting a user on what to do with his posts.  Addressing that will be a major priority once we get SP 5.3 out the door – just waiting on the WP folks to finish 3.6 (they are quite behind schedule)…

is he posting links in his post?  you can refuse a post with more than X links…

another option is to add a wp plugin that allows you to moderate registrations… several good ones out there like theme my login…

I don’t see how “theme my login” could be useful at all to my situation – it’s not a security/spam registration plugin but one to theme the login interface!

Yes, I have SP Ban plugin. I found his IP from his sign-up email because I get email notification of IP addresses associated with them. Does SP track IPs separately?

Please prioritize the option of deleting all of a user’s posts when deleting him! It’s really required for spam registrations that dump 20+ messages all over the place, which have to be manually deleted one at a time. He got clever to my more than X links approach and drops email addresses and clues for what to search for rather than links.

as I said, theme my login has functionality for putting all registrations into moderation for admin approval… dont judge a book by its cover/title… simple press really isnt simple any more…

not sure what you mean by track IPs separately… you can ‘ban’ as many different IPs as you want…  each signup will show the IP of that registration…

as I said, it will be high priority in the next version after 5.3 – perhaps only mobile theme will be higher…

Putting all registrations into admin for approval would solve nothing. This would just annoy new users who want to join the forum and interact, and not prevent spammers, only delay them (their names are hardly indicators that they will spam).

What I mean is that I only see an IP address from the sign-up email. This is a feature of WordPress separate to simple-press. Does simple-press log IP addresses? Where do people get the IP addresses they put into that ban field, if not from sign-up emails? Separate plugins? I’m not sure where to look apart from their sign-up email, or if there is any point and if I should just use the sign-up IP address.

Luckily, there have been no spams over the weekend, so perhaps blocking the IP of this guy did it, but I look forward to a much simpler way to handle all spam posts in the next update.

The IP address is also stored against each users post – available for admins to view using the forum tools when displaying the posts (topic view).

Any news on this update that was mentioned a few messages above? I still have users logging in and leaving 20 or 40 or more spammy messages, and I would like the DEFAULT to be that when I delete a user, I delete their messages along with them.

I already have it such that guests aren’t allowed to post, so if I delete a user and they become a “guest” to me it seems perfectly reasonable that their messages should vanish. A default of leaving them active should only be an option that you activate if needed for some reason.

It’s so time consuming to manually delete each and every spammy message, when it’s from the SAME user, and could be just one click.

As Mr Papa said on post 2 above – releasing our 5.3 update is dependent upon WordPress 3.6 – which is now many weeks overdue. Perhaps if there had been any indication that WP were going to overrun by this much time we may have organised our end a little differently but it went into it’s first beta more or less when scheduled and you expect then that it will to come to release in a timely fashion. It didn’t.

So still no WP 3.6. Hence no SP 5.3 yet either. Hopefully wont be too much longer now.

We are now on SP 5.4 – could someone explain to me how to bulk remove huge amounts of spam from single users, since this feature was going to be added in 5.3?

I have two users who have single handedly taken over my entire forum, and I don’t know how to get rid of their spam other than manually deleting each individual message. Hopefully I’m missing something obvious…

If it helps it’s always the same spammy title “Buy Real and Fake Passports” so if I saw a particular word in the title, could I make that post in moderation by default?

Also, I tried marking the messages as spam myself, but they were NOT added to my moderation queue for me to at least see the “Mark as spam and delete all by this user” option.

Thanks

Well – firstly we made no such promise for 5.3 – in fact it was stated that we could only look at this after 5.3 was released. And no – there has been no movement in this regard. It remains a high priority and has been sidelined by (a) more pressing requirements and (b) the problem with WordPress explained below.

The main problem we have is a technical one and is actually a shortcoming with WordPress. They have not given plugin authors the facility – which is odd actually – to add components to the delete user admin panel or influence the delete user code until AFTER a user has been removed. This has essentially blocked us from doing what we both want and need to do which is add a consistent approach no matter where a user is removed.

SO – I understand this does not help you immediately. I also understand that you feel this IS of a much higher priority to everything else we need to balance into development.  I also understand that as you do not allow guests then you do not care about adding appropriate and much needed delete options. But we will get there.

I am curious about one thing… you said ‘… I tried marking the messages as spam myself…’. How? By doing what?

OK apologies for misinterpreting the previous messages. I’m sure you can understand my frustration; it’s always the same guy or team pitching fake passports that take over my language learning forum…

I meant that I tried flagging the post, but I believe that only emails admins that a post has been flagged. What I find frustrating is that the spam filter in place (Akismet?) does indeed have a “remove user and all their posts” options in the admin panel! But it only happens on random posts, and I can’t manually add one to that list.

Thanks..

What you could do – and we could help with – is define a small function to run off of the post processing code to abort the save of certain conditions are met.

This is easily achieved but the problem is that (a) you would need to be very careful with defining those conditions so as not to pick up and exclude genuine posts and (b) it would be a changing target. Once your spammer knows he has been targeted he will almost certainly just change the text to escape the abort.

If this is of interest then we coud help you with this.

I imagine this spammer would simply realize the issue and rephrase the wording. I’ve manually deleted all the spam posts and blocked him (IP address and all) again…

Any other suggestions appreciated…

Well of course they will!

As far as I am aware, there is no known 100% effective method for stopping spammers if you do not want to apply strict member only rules to your site. Every method is a compromise and every method can be broken and will need adapting as and when it gets broken.

As I say – we could write a filter where you could input phrases, words etc., that would abort a post saving but yes – that would probably need updating on a regular basis. Might be easier than deleting lost and lost of unwanted posts however and would at least help to stop them appearing in the first place.

And if anyone out there can refute my claim above and can demonstrate how to do it then please let me know as I would love to hear about it.