100s of Spammers entering Events

[Susan]

I have had 100s of spam events added to my site today. I’m having to delete them all as well as the email notifications. I had set the community settings to allow guest submissions, but changed that today and somehow they’re still getting through. They are not showing any organizer so don’t think whoever is posting them is signed in to the site. I also can’t search to delete using an organizer or venue since that’s not filled out. They are adding dozens each hour. How do I stop it and block unregistered users? I have the Allow anonymous submissions unchecked. I just set the recaptcha key so hopefully will slow them down. But I need to know why they are able to submit and stop it.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Susan,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

I’m sorry to hear that you are experiencing this issue!

It sounds like you have already begun to implement the spam prevention measures that I would take to prevent this from happening again on your site.  The two things I would recommend are:

• Uncheck Allow anonymous users under Events Settings < Community
• Set up recaptcha keys under Events Settings < APIs

Let me know if that helps!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Susan]

Thanks, I’ve done both of those. For some reason, a few have still gotten through with no author, but yesterday, I ended up with over 4000 events added to the site.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Susan,

I visited your site and it does require a log-in to see the submission page, which is great.

If you are being spammed, I am assuming that somehow, the spammers have figured out a way to create a WordPress user account on your site and circumvent the Captcha you have in place.

To address that, there are a couple of things I would recommend:

1. Install a plugin such as Theme my login: https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-my-login/ . That will provide you with more control over the login and account creation process (adding a hurdle), provided you configure it accordingly
2. Install a security plugin (iThemes security and Wordfence are popular choices). This will let you control users from official blacklists as well as prevent spammers from using scripts to try to create users.

Let me know if that helps.

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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