Geeklog Forums

Hi,

Seems like this should be easy, but is there somewhere in the Configuration menu or something to disable Spam-X?

Several contributors to my website have recently had normal looking posts rejected. One of them I was able to repeat myself, it was just a comment on a story with a link to a Blog spot page. The page seemed okay to me.

Someone else had a story submission rejected, I don't have the exact details though, but it wasn't their first rejection.

So I'm now at risk of losing contributors, so I'd like to turn it off, at least for now. Is that one of the options? Is it something to do with Spam-X Actions?

Cheers,
Brett

Ah the irony. When I tried post the question above this site rejected it as spam detected. I went Back on the browser to see what could have been offensive, and noted that I had blogspot dot com (replace dot with .) and so I tried removing that and it posted fine. So it seems that even the root site of blogspot is banned, as well as some other mainstream sites.

But that's a separate issue I guess - how do I disable it?

You could just disable the plugin.

When you are logged in as Administrator, go to the plugins section under the Admins Only block.

SpamX is a great plugin and has protected my sites from thousands of spam posts, but I do have a similar issue with SpamX. I hope to fix it soon by adding a new right that will allow spamx to skip over certain users.

---

One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Instead of disabling the plugin right away, I'd suggest to fine-tune things.

Check your spamx.log to see why a post was actually blocked. In case of blogspot.com, you'll probably find a note that the post was blocked by SLV. Blogspot, unfortunately, is riddled by spam blogs and often gets blocked by SLV because of that. You could add your user's blog to the SLV whitelist (or blogspot.com entirely) to avoid that.

If you haven't already done so, you may want to read through the Spam-X documentation to get an idea how it works and which options it offers.

bye, Dirk

Thanks for the replies.

According to the log, all the spam rejections I've had this year have been via SLV. I only allow logged in users to post anything. I've had about 40 rejections, of which probably half were real users making multiple attempts before giving up. I know one case was blogspot related, and the most recent one had a lot of links so presumably one of those was considered bad (although I tried to replicate it and it worked for me).

Is there a way to just turn off SLV and not the rest of Spam X? It isn't clear to me from the documentation what other kind of fine tuning can be done.

Or maybe since SLV seems to do all the blocking anyway, maybe it's really a matter of the whole Spam-X on or off.

The worry is probably that user 1 has tried to submit a lot of spam, say 20 of those 40 cases, but we don't have a user 1. I assume we deleted it years ago when we were first messing around setting up the site. The first user listed is user 2.

Whitelisting is an option (as I said). Some people here on geeklog.net often post links to their sites which sometimes triggers SLV into thinking that a spam wave is under way. Adding the domain name to the SLV whitelist prevents that.

To disable SLV, simply remove the 4 files that start with "SLV" from plugins/spamx



Uid 1 is the pseudo-account used for anonymous users. You shouldn't delete it (and Geeklog won't list it anyway).

bye, Dirk

The trouble with whitelisting is that we often get stories with 6 or 7 links on them, and people just give up if they get rejected. I guess a detailed error message saying it could be their links, press Back and try again without them MIGHT convince them to try again. For now I might just take my chances with spam rather than risk losing people.



Oh! That makes sense then. I wonder how anonymous got as far as submitting spam then since anonymous isn't allowed to? It was obviously spammers, as I got several within minutes, from a wide range of IPs. I'll see if it happens again, or if the site lets them through.

Anyway, thanks for your help.

Depends on the type of spam and what you're blocking for anonymous users. Could be story submissions, comments, calendar or link submissions, trackbacks (which are always anonymous), etc.

Let us know if it happens again.

bye, Dirk

I don't allow anything anonymous, so yeah perhaps it was via traceback then.