malachite

I figured out what is going on. I had interpreted things incorrectly. The spammers are using the bbpress login page and, as indicated in the docs, this plugin won’t work with altered login pages.

I didn’t think they were using that page because the spam emails were never registered with a bbpress role. It turns out that they either never complete the registration process to get that role, or when they do complete the process it is because they use the lost password link to complete the process, not the email sent by WordPress. Interestingly, the ones that use the lost password link to recover the password have a different IP address then the bot used for the initial registration.

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply.

Something I did when I followed your outlined steps got things working. Unfortunately I don’t know exactly what it was. Nothing I did before deleting and reinstalling the plugin worked. After reinstalling the plugin I immediately checked the status of the log and it was still showing as missing so I hit the delete button and it created a new log. But it did not show the log as having been deleted because there was no log to delete. When I pressed the button a second time I got the delete message. It was only after doing all the above that I again tried to register with a known bad email and it was denied.

Some more details, in case they help:

My site is using bbpress, but my login spam is all coming from the standard login page which has not been modified. There are no public pages with open comment forms.

I tried deleting the log and it successfully created a new log. I did not get the deleted message because there was no old log to delete. When I deleted the newly created log I then got the deleted message.

Force resetting the options did not fix the problem.

My best guess is that reinstalling the plugin solved the problem. I should have done that before posting. It doesn’t seem likely, but I suppose it is possible there was something with creating the log file that solved the problem.

Now I will go change the options to what I had.

Thanks again for your help.

I’m not seeing any wpfai_socialmedia() function in my copy of the plugin and the wp-font-awesome-share-icons.php file only has 481 lines. Am I missing something obvious?