You should use the Spam Login Filter plugin (https://elgg.org/plugins/774755) in any case. This plugin checks against the StopForumSpam database during account creation if the entered data is suspicious. With the plugin in use you should also register an account at the StopForumSpam.com site to get an API key. With such an API key entered in the Spam Login Filter plugin settings you can report users to them (instead of just deleting an account you get an additional report+delete option). Reporting spammers helps to reduce the number of spammers registering in the future not only for you but also for other sites. The Spam Login Filter plugin is the most important plugin to reduce the number of spammers already before they could create an account and you might need no other but this one. I have created a similar other plugin (https://elgg.org/plugins/1641554) that works in the same way but is much less effective (their database focus is less on the typical spammers of social network sites as it seems and you can't send reports to them either).
Then there are plugin to help with spammers after they managed to create an account: Spam Throttle (https://elgg.org/plugins/821368) and Trusted User Spam Reports (https://elgg.org/plugins/1508071, requires also https://elgg.org/plugins/1508060). But I hadn't needed these so far as Spam Login Filter already helped sufficiently.
Thank you for this very generous and likely helpful response. I'll pursue your suggestions.
Doug Bedell
Unfortunately Im going through this as well..just added the recaptcha plugin..hopefully that helps me!
I am using Spam Login Filter along with Spam Throttle
This has reduced spam on my website by 80%-90%
I use this plugin galliTextCaptcha i think it needs you to register to a site to get random text questions to answer, without registering (which i couldn't for some reason) it only gives 1 question every time, but you can change it in files to whatever you want.
there's a url in the files somewhere that takes you to an rss feed page, it changes question on refresh but i didn't know how to add it sorry.
Elgg is really flexible with both image manipulation and layout modifications. What you want can already be done without much effort
I have noticed that the fairness postings are not done with the bundled Blog plugin of Elgg. I can't tell from just viewing your site how exactly it's done but my guess is that the "Fairness" plugin is quite similar to the Blog plugin (and your developer might have even cloned the blog plugin to create a plugin that can be used in parallel to the blog plugin for more specific postings).
The point is that the Blog Tools plugin allows adding images to blog postings made with the bundled Blog plugin. The necessary functionality to upload images, to resize images and to output the images are already there. And the Blog Tools plugin even allows to set the desired image size in its plugin settings. The images might not be displayed above the blog title section but that's an issue that's very, very easy to fix.
My suggestion is that your developer should take a look at the code of the Blog Tools plugin to see how it's done there. He only needs to take the corresponding code from the Blog Tools plugin and integrate it into the "Fairness" plugin with some adjustment. He would possible need to add the code in the plugin settings form to allow for setting the image size, add the code in the posting form to allow for uploading an image and in the save action to handle the resizing/saving of the image. And then modify the object view in the Fairness plugin to also output the image (and if the image is echoed before the title section it's most likely already done as you want it to be).
As you don't use the bundled blog plugin for the Fairness postings (or any other bundled plugin) but some custom plugin made by your developer it wouldn't make any difference anyway if the image upload / output functionality (as provided by the Blog Tools plugin) would be added to Elgg core (as for example to the Blog plugin). Your developer would still need to modify your custom "Fairness" plugin in the same way.
I'll send this along to my developer. Thanks!
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