Spam

[msgrandlge]

Is there any way to add a captcha or some other human-proving interface to Community Events? The spam we are getting is overwhelming. Perhaps you know of a 3rd party plugin that works with the form… something, anything, please.

[Casey]

Jared,
Thanks for reaching out, and sorry to hear you’re having trouble here, but hopefully I can help. We’ve definitely gotten a lot of feedback on this issue (here’s the UserVoice thread), and are aware of the problem that this is creating for users. Our development team is actively working on a solution to this problem for a future release.

While I don’t have an estimate of when this might be released, as a temporary workaround you could require users to be registered in order to submit events. While I know this isn’t ideal, it will eliminate the spam issue.

Thanks for being patient with us on this issue, and hopefully we’ll have some updates on this issue soon!

-Casey-

[Casey]

I just wanted to follow up and see if you’re all set here or if you still have further questions. Just let me know if you have further questions or if I should go ahead and close out this thread. Thanks! 🙂

-Casey-

[msgrandlge]

Hi Casey,

Thanks for getting back. I understand that there is currently no other option that to make people sign in in order to post community events. However, I feel that the issue is unresolved because I do not feel that this should be a requirement. I hope your team is able to correct this soon. It seems very strange to me that there are very simple contact forms that have captcha but that a sophisticated plugin like this one does not.

Thanks you,

Jared

[Casey]

Jared,
I definitely understand your frustration here, and I’ll go ahead and leave this thread open and let you know when we have an update on this. Thanks for your patience!

-Casey-

[Casey]

Jared,
While you’re waiting for an official fix to be released for this, you can take a look at using this plugin as a temporary fix. You’ll also need to install the Really Simple Captcha plugin before activating this.

Keep in mind that we can’t provide support for this third-party plugin, but maybe it will at least provide you with some relief until we release an officially supported spam prevention solution. Thanks! 🙂

-Casey-

[msgrandlge]

Thank you Casey. I will look in to how to use that script. I have no idea how to use that code, but will try to figure it out.

[James Duncan]

Thanks, Jared for leaving this open.

I’ve been experiencing similar spam challenges of late. I’ve changed the setting from everything being public to draft (which is a pain) but my question is: how can I delete the bogus users/locations/etc from the database?

[Casey]

jimduncan,
If your issue is the same as the above please do feel free to monitor this thread, but if you need assistance for your own specific scenario it would be great if you could create a fresh thread of your own. Thanks!

-Casey-

[Mac]

Hey Jared if you figure out how to make that code work let us know!

[Mac]

Boom. Casey is The Man. Your code solved my spam issue.

[msgrandlge]

Mac, could you please tell us laymen’s how you use that code? Thanks!

[Mac]

Jared, I think I can do that since I’m a layman! 🙂

Here’s the process I used (we already had Really Simple Captcha installed in tandem with Contact Form 7):

1. Backed the site up.
2. Using cPanel (or FTP) Created a new folder in the /wp-contents/plugins folder and named it patched-up-community-events-captcha
3. copied the code Casey provided and pasted into Notepad and saved file as patched-up-community-events-captcha.php
4. uploaded the patched-up-community-events-captcha.php file into the newly created patched-up-community-events-captcha folder
5. Activated plugin from the wp-admin control panel>> installed plugins
6. tested

[Mac]

Someone smarter than me might have created the patched-up-community-events-captcha folder and saved the .php file in it before uploading the folder into the plugins folder. I said smarter. Not better looking.

[msgrandlge]

So. Did that. Have the requisite plugins. But no captcha appears on the community add event form. Thoughts? I feel like I must be missing something simple.

[Author]

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