Hello,

I upgraded Joomla of our website to 3.x version and installed K2 plugin.

However, we were stupid enough not to include Captcha and were targeted by spammers. Then we had to disable and delete over 20k (!) spam comments.

However, I noticed unusual increase in usage (overusage) and were even warned by our host serverl.
When I see the latest visitor I see accesses to our non-existing pages.

Some of these links are /tours/adventure-mongolia/1-latest-news/144-helps-tips/144-helps-tips.html?start=10

We found that these accessed links were written as K2 articles so we also deleted these articles, but somehow these links are still accessed by someone. Even the directory is wrong as we don't have this directory structure. But when I click on them it shows 404 error.

Could you please help me on this? We are constantly targeted by spam bots who are overusing our resources!

Hi. I am a bit confused about some things you wrote. You are saying that these URLs are still accessible and then you are saying that they give a 404 error. Since you are getting a 404 this means that the category ( or the item ) is either deleted or unpublished. If someone is still requesting those pages, this is the spam result. Probably those links have spread over the web through other spam bots or search engines. In any case you cannot prevent someone for accessing a URL. Since you have cleaned up your site those URLs should give a 404 error. What you need to ensure is that those links are not generated by your site. Some other things to do:

1. If you don't need user registration, disable it.
2. Ensure that K2 front-end editing and comments are properly configured. Use one of the antispam options that K2 provides.
3. Enable Joomla! caching. This will speed up your site avoiding performance issues. Also enable the system cache plugin.

I have been chasing the same problem for months. I think it's the Joomla sitemap generator. I just converted to J2.5 from J1.5 and started using RSSEO to generate the XML sitemap. My old sitemap had tons of duplicate URLs (25 or more for one page) and the new one has only a few. I've updated the robots.txt file to disallow /components/ (plural) and other items that I found in the old sitemap then generated a new one. I've gone from a 10k sitemap to a 3k map. I still have a problem getting rid of the URLs with ?start=20 and /mailto.... at the end of the article URL. Once those are gone I think Google will be happier with my site.

"If someone is still requesting those pages, this is the spam result."

Exactly, those pages are long gone and when I click on them it results in 404. But somehow I see someone is still requesting those pages!

Also most of these URLs have ?start= ... endings.

Could you please explain on antispam measures in K2?

Thank you!

@ hillbilly

K2 provides antispam protection for comments. It provides Akismet and Google reCAPTCHA integrations. You can even enable both of them. You can see all the relevant settings in K2 parameters. If you do not use comments in your site, disable them in K2 parameters. The same goes for registration. If your site does not require registrations disable them in User Manager settings.