Hi everybody,
During this months I got 2 spam attacks which made my site to be suspended.
I found out it was at least on one occasion due to a massive spam attack into K2 comments, which I forgot to check for antispam settings when I was still working on the site.
So I have 2 questions:
- I do not need comments anyway. Is it enough to disable comments in order to avoid spam attacks?
- How do I get rid of the 76,000 spam comments in comments database? My idea is to paste new files over the comments files through FTP, but I have no idea about which files I shall overwrite.
Thanks in advance for your precious help :)
Katia

If you dont need the comments, just disable them. Why have it and worry about spams.

With the existing 76,000 comments in database, the simple solution would be to hide the comments from showing in the item pages. If they are not shown then it shouldnt matter. Replacing the files via ftp will not delete the existing comments since they are in the database. If you are really nitpicky and want to keep db clean, then I would delete the comments by locating the tables and columns from phpmyadmin. But I would strongly wouldnt recommend you that. You can delete your entire site if you dont know what you are doing. Just disable and hide them. Thats the easiest and simple solution.

Good luck! :)

Hi Mr_Anonymous,
thanks for your reply.
So after I disabled comments and deleted 2 spam users I found into my users list, what can you suggest to avoid spammers to attack my site again?
Katia

This is going to be a never ending battle cuz no matter what you do, spammers will always find a way and some will still get through. However you can make things a little bit hard for spammers when they come to your site:

1) Enable email verification before their accounts are activated
2) Check out some Joomla plugins and see what works for you.
3) Try Stop Forum Spam
4) Be proactive and always monitor your website and delete spam accounts straight away.
5) Dont allow new registered users to submit anything straight away without approval from admins.
6) Use Recapthca - these are not too hard for a lot of spam bots to crack now a days.
7) Go to Joomla Global Configuration - Users Configuration and set New User Account Activation to 'Admin'. This might be alright for small to medium sites.

PS: I havent released my Joomla site as a production site yet. So I cant give you an answer based on my practical experience with Joomla yet. But with my experience with other cms, I find a good Q&A (instead of Captcha) works good when the Q&As are unique, cannot be googled and require a human to work it out. Having said that, I havent explored these aspects with Joomla yet. I will only look into this when I am ready to launch my site.

Try out a few (or all) and see what works for you. Good luck!

Katia Motta wrote: - How do I get rid of the 76,000 spam comments in comments database?

I just noticed that in K2 backend settings, when you Go to Componets -> K2 -> Comments, there is a setting for "Delete unpublished comments". That might work for you to delete those 76,000 spam comments if they are unpublished. Did you try that out? Remember to take a backup before you delete these just incase. :)

There is also a way to limit comments to 100.

HI
I am having the exact same issues. My problem is when i switch the comments off in the global configuration seetings or make any changes whatsoever my menu at the top disapears and all modules where I have text. I then have to reset and reload a back up using Akeeba.

I thought by going in to the back end and deleting a certain line of script code in the form settings where the spammers had to hit the submit button so I was able to remove that. A few minutes later I was hit once more with a ton of spammed replies. How can this be possible. Like I say even when I switch on the Recaptcha my website pretty much disapears where my log menu doesnt appear nor any text. Picture still load up though.

My website is www.connormaguire.com. The issues are in my art blog which is constructed in K2

Any help would be great

Connor Maguire

Hello,

The first looks like a template issue. If by changing the menu item's settings or disabling the comments the site breaks this means that there is an issue with your overrides.

The comments are stored in your database in the #__k2_comments table. You can try emptying this table (KEEP A BACKUP, I cannot stress this enough) or you can use the backend to delete them.

As for the recaptcha, can you enable it in a test site and send me a link?