How to Tackle Spam With The BuddyPress Spam Link Plugin

BuddyPress spam is a perennial problem that can negatively affect your social network. At times it can seem like weeds taking over your beautiful garden. Everyone knows what it’s like to receive spam emails but when your members begin receiving spam messages through your community, they may feel as though their profile, participation and experiences are not secure. That is why, when building a community, it’s important to maintain good spam protection; a spam-free experience produces subtle confidence that will keep your users returning.
Stephanie Leary has developed a plugin that does two things to help you quickly combat spam on your BuddyPress site:

• Adds the “Mark as spammer” link back to the admin bar
• Adds a “Spammer” button to the activity stream entry meta row

Below is the new “Spammer” button that lets you easily mark a user as a spammer from the activity stream, which is where you most often become aware of spammers having infiltrated your community:

The BuddyPress Spam Link plugin is currently available for download from github. Stephanie is considering adding it to the WordPress repository, depending on how discussion shapes up regarding this related ticket in trac.

How to Use the BuddyPress Spam Link Plugin

Download the buddypress-spam-link.php file and upload it to your plugins folder. Alternately you can copy the code from that file and add it to your bp-custom.php file. However, I’d recommend keeping it as a separate plugin for the sake of troubleshooting and updating.
Killing BuddyPress spam accounts goes much faster with the BuddyPress Spam Link plugin installed. Many thanks to Stephanie Leary for making it available to the community on github. This plugin is a must-have for BuddyPress community managers who want to be able to quickly combat spam as soon as it’s reported.
photo credit: freezelight via photopin cc