Hello Kane,

Sorry for late reply to this,

A month ago, I received a spam blog. I went to view the blog, but it wasn't there (it is possible it was deleted by a moderator).

Yes, that was possible.

I found the user and disabled them in joomla users. Today I received the same spam blog notification for the same blog, but again, the actual blog isn't there and the user is still disabled. I have included a couple images.

What i advise is you should enable the New User Account Activation - Admin, so when the new user registered in your site, they should waiting for admin approval.

Second, may i know is it only this user "escourtservice" SPAM post in your site? Please advise.

Hi Arlex,

Forcing admin approval for registering is not an optimal approach for me. I'd prefer forcing admin approval for publishing blogs, but even that isn't the best. I do recognize that without forcing admin approval for either of these that the site is subject to spam, which I accept. It is the inability to find the blogs, to have a deleted blog keep triggering notifications, or a disabled user's blog triggering notifications that concerns me.

I will go ahead and move forward with forcing admin approval for publishing blogs through ACL permissions, but the issue still concerns me.

No, there was one other spam account that I found called "Technical" that I found that was also disabled. The difference between the two was that the "Technical" user's blog remained unpublished.

Hello Kane,

Sorry for late reply to this,
That's strange, because if the user already disabled, it should not have the permission to publish.
And if you set the ACL control the registered user group is not allow the user publish entry, it should be fine because when the user publish the blog post, the blog post should be under the moderation mode.

Can you delete this 2 user again and see the happening is it still persists? Or you wouldn't like to receive the new blog entries email notification? please advise.

I am now quite certain that this is a hack and not just spam. I received another email notification of a spam blog post that is not posted on the site. It is different than the previous, the user has been disabled and the ACL for publishing has been disabled for registered users. I have included an image below. Please assist with this as spam posts is a turn off for a community.

Thanks in advance, Kane

Hello Kane,

Your site is not being hacked and it's definitely a spam The reason why you are getting this email message is most likely because there was some delay when they were spamming your blogs since the cron does not send every email at once. I have purged all the emails in the mail pool (which are back dated on 15th April).

I appreciate that.

You are most welcome

Any thoughts on why there is such a back up in the cron job?

Hello Kane,

Sorry, what back up are you referring to?

You mentioned that the issue was that the blog was already in queue for email notification since april 15, yet didn't get sent until a couple days ago. Why would there be such a lag?

Hello Kane,

To be honest, I am not really sure because looking at the mail pool, they are actually created on the 15th April 2014. If the cronjob was working, it should already send them out immediately. I guess there's a problem with your cronjob setup?

OK, Ill look into that. Thanks again.

btw, I am getting error on this thread. Just above this reply field

"Notice: Undefined variable: post in /home/admin/stackideas.com/plugins/system/stacksredirect/deps.php on line 112 Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in /home/admin/stackideas.com/plugins/system/stacksredirect/deps.php on line 112"

Hello Kane,

Can you give this a try again and see if you are hitting any errors?

test reply

Nope the error is gone!

Thanks for updating Kane