Profile Spam?

Hi @consultant1027,

We have to walk a fine line between protecting website owners from spam and restricting free speech.

What you’re talking about is human spam.

If we add something like that to the plugin, it’s a bit of a slippery slope because we don’t want to restrict free communication on a forum.

Restricting user communication on a forum is something that has to be dealt with carefully.

The best way to protect against profile spam and other types of BuddyPress spam, is to prevent the spam user from registering in the first place. Spammers typically make their intentions clear from the beginning, and follow predictable patterns. It’s best to just cut them off right away. Using this strategy eliminates the vast majority of spam issues.

WP-SpamShield’s has powerful registration anti-spam that will stop 100% of bot signups, and the vast majority of human spam signups.

Once a user has joined a BuddyPress site, if they engage in activity such as posting spam links, you can mark them as a spammer in the User admin. That’s already built into BuddyPress. You’re not likely to have many of those after you install WP-SpamShield.

I hope this helps answer your question. Please see the plugin’s documentation for more information on features.

– Scott

It’s not unusual for discussion forums to be moderated and for user registration agreements to acknowledge that they are agreeing to not post any promotional or explicit material, so the freedom of speech issue really isn’t relevant.

With that said, just let me confirm I understand this correctly…

If someone registers legitimately and then decides to post links to Pornography websites in their user profile, your plugin doesn’t prevent this? Posting information is posting information whether it is a comment, a post, or a user profile description.

But I’m finding that all these plugins appear to use some sort of AI to screen posts/comments/replies but they ignore user profile info. Too bad.

Hi @consultant1027,

It’s not unusual for discussion forums to be moderated and for user registration agreements to acknowledge that they are agreeing to not post any promotional or explicit material…

Yes, we’re quite familiar with forums and how they work. ?? Our team is actively involved in a number of forums, and is actively involved in anti-spam efforts on a number of influential sites. We’ve been involved in anti-spam for a long time now. Acceptable use policies vary greatly by website.

…so the freedom of speech issue really isn’t relevant.

Unfortunately that’s simply not true.

Where the freedom of speech issue is relevant, is that each forum has a different purpose and may have differing views on what is appropriate, and what is not.

Perhaps one forum does not want links to pornography websites, but another forum may be an adult forum, and it may be perfectly appropriate there. If we added a blanket block on adult websites, we would effectively be dictating policy for all forum websites, and that is not our place. Each forum has to make their own policy and acceptable use standards.

Notice that this is not an anti-porn plugin, but an anti-spam plugin.

That’s not to say that we don’t agree with you about the need for better policy enforcement features in BuddyPress and bbPress.

Perhaps we can develop something like this, but that would need to be a separate plugin.

– Scott