Still lot of spam registrations, seems not working

Hi,
I do not know if I a doing something wrong, since I get large amounts of spam registrations still after using this plugin/component. Does it report the ones I have marked as spam back to blacklists?

I have there as settings to check both registration and login, and to check all IP, name and email
stopforumspam.com, projecthoneypot.org (with API), DNSBL sorbs.net and spamcop.net are all set to YES.
with allowed threat / rating set to 0.

But situation is like without this plugin. Which is enabled too. So either I am doing something wrong or I need to change to some other Joomla extension or method, as if this is not working.

Hi,

the Plugin does not report back to the blacklist servers. The blacklist servers work well without such reports because the collect spammer information actively (honeypot principle).

Setting the "Check Username" option to "Yes" is not recommended (but should only result in to many blocked users). IP and email suffice.

You should enable the "Log Spambots to DB" option.
You will then be able to see in the component spambotcheck all logins and registrations which were prevented by the plugin (Submenu Logs on the left side).

Project Honeypot requires a api key which you have to get by yourself from there website. Without this key checking against their database does not work.

One point where you might mess up the configuration of the plugin is the whitelist. (If you use a generic email whitelist for example with @gmail.com, all e-mails with this domain are not blocked).

Regards,
Aicha

Hi,

I enabled the login to DB, and when seeing the log page, there is many listed. I suppose all of them are blocked ones? They are all from StopForumSpam. But it seems none from other places. Can it check only one of them - so should only one at a time be enabled?

I have added the api key from project honey pot there, but I since they do not show up at log, I doubt it checks that. How could I see if there was a problem with api?

To add the earlier, I still get huge amount of spam registrations, so that stopforumspam is only blocking some of them

To add still, I checked project honeybot website, and in the dashboard, i see:
Your http:BL API key:
and after that the api key I have installed to site. But from the logs of honeypot, I see that there has been no connections made to there. Does the BL above indicate that it is missing some setting at honeypot -side, or is it just that the component is not contacting it for some reason?

Hi,

so the plugin is working.

The reason, why you mostly find, that spammers are blocked by stopforumspam is, that the plugin checks first against stopforumspam and if a user is listed there it blocks the user, logs the action to the databse and does not check unnecessarily against see other online provider. If a user is not listed on stopforumspam the plugin checks against the next (enabled) provider (ProjectHoneypot) and so on.

Usually it takes the online providers some time to find new spammers so the plugin is certainly not able to block all spammers.
You may try to improve the result, using the blacklist feature (I once had a lot of spam from gmail.com which was not blocked and added temporarily the @gmail.com to the blacklist).
Regards,
Aicha