Actaully a few days ago I was trying to post a message and suddenly the browser hangs. I pressed backspace to return to the previous page and suddenly it says - "this IP was used to post spam." I was not trying to post spam. Can you plase unblock my IP? Infact I faced this problem several times while posting to kerneltrap :(. My original post was from a different machine.
Yes, I wrote an aggressive spam filter to monitor these web pages -- it's the only way I'm able to keep anonymous comments and forum postings enabled. Unfortunately it does occasionally have false positives, and does result in people being blocked that shouldn't be. That said, I do review these logs and when I notice non-spam in the spam-bucket I remove it and thus un-block that user.
The problem is compounded by a buggy PHP opcode cache which occasionally (~once or twice a week) causes problems with Apache which causes posting comments to randomly return a white screen. This makes people submit the same comment more than once, and this is immediately flagged by my spam filter... I'm reviewing alternative opcode caches in the hopes of resolving this annoyance.
The spam filter thing is completely ridiculously broken! Over 50% of my posts have been rejected, and you cannot even go back and save the message because the thing will give you an "access denied" error.
You might as well disable comments in the first place, so people don't waste their precious time fighting this braindead spam filter. Furthermore, when attempting to "comply" and log in with a new user, I get "page not found" error.
Well, five minutes later, KernelTrap does suddenly not consider this message spam anymore: kerneltrap.org/Linux/BootUtils_Automatically_Detecting_the_Root_Volume#comment-270095
Yes, I was thoughtful enough to save that comment prior to posting, but this is the first rewrite of the this comment.
But anyway, disabling comments also has the upside of stopping the trolling/flaming battleground that KernelTrap has degenerated into.
Err, apologies for the for the comment spam (which the spam filter "surprisingly" failed to catch), but those post(s) really did not appear the first four times I attempted posting them.
Reviewing the logs, the problem you ran into was quite simple: your first comment was a rapid double post of an identical comment. That is very common for spammers, and hence the spam filter immediately highlighted you as a potential spammer. At that point, your IP address and all comments posted from your IP address are black listed until I have time to review it, usually the following morning (Eastern Time). Certainly frustrating for you once that happens, but the alternative is that I wake up each morning to 10,000 real spam messages cluttering the website. Yes, there really is that much spam being regularly posted. Unfortunately this also means non-spam occasionally gets blocked and I don't notice -- I continue to improve my filters to try and prevent this.
One work around is to create a user account -- if I notice that you're consistently posting useful comments, I will quietly mark your account and it won't be scanned by my filters any more.
Is it a perfect solution? No. Is it better than having a website filled with comment spam? I think so. Is it better than the frustration of trying to figure out the characters in a Captcha? I think so.
True, re-posting the comment is my first reaction when a recently posted comment does not appear on the page -- I assumed that it was eaten by code gremlins for good. Sorry about that.
I would suggest displaying a prominent message stating "Your comment has been received and is pending review", instead of simply not displaying the new comment without a hint of what happened to it.
Yes, that is exactly what it does. A message appears at the top of the screen when your message is flagged as spam, alerting you that it will be reviewed by a site administrator. HOWEVER -- once you're flagged as a potential spammer, all future attempts to post result in a ~30 second delay. You likely ran into that, compounding your frustration.
I have to admit that I couldn't find the message even when specifically looking for it. (I even searched the page for any text including "comment" and couldn't find it.) If the notice really is there then you have done an excellent job at hiding it.
These kinds of notices should be in the center of the page, inside a thick red box with a warning icon, so that nobody would miss them.
I hope it doesn't happen to you again -- but if it does, look for the box at the top of the screen. It will say:
"Your IP address (@ip) was recently used to post spam to this website. For this reason, you are currently not allowed to post new content. If you believe this is in error, please contact the site administrator."
Sounds like you're still not following. In an attempt to make it more clear here's the use case:
User Joe writes a legitimate comment and hits "Post comment"
KernelTrap spam filter thinks the message is spam and marks it for review
Joe is redirected back to the article, but his recently written comment does not appear anywhere, and there is not even a hint saying what happened to it
Joe thinks that his comment was eaten by code gremlins; he clicks 'back' and tries "Post comment" again
KernelTrap still blocks the comment without notice
Noticeably frustrated, Joe curses shitty PHP-based CMSes and decides to try one more time. Joe clicks browser 'back' button.
KernelTrap unhelpfully informs Joe that he is a nasty spammer and must contact KernelTrap admins (but still does not even suggest that the comments could ever have been sent off for review)
In extreme frustration, Joe contacts admin Jeremy and makes unfounded claims about how broken the spam filter is
Jeremy is confused because he has never had his comments eaten by the spam filter
What really should have happened:
Joe writes a legitimate comment and hits "Post comment"
KernelTrap spam filter thinks the message is spam and marks it for review
Joe is redirected back to the article, with a visible notice stating that the comment was queued for review
Joe understands what's going on and doesn't waste any time fruitlessly combating the spam filter
Joe checks back the next day and witnesses that his legitimate comment has indeed appeared
World peace finally arrives
Notice how the third step differs? What do you expect Joe to think when his comments disappear without notice?
When you say "what really should have happened" you are correct, as that is how my filters are designed. If you are blacklisted by my spam filter, you should see a message telling you such. Granted the wording of the message could be improved, but that doesn't appear to be the issue at hand -- for some reason you simply didn't see the message.
I am planning to rework my spam filters quite a bit in the relatively near future, and I will take this into consideration. I will be sure that in the new version there is no doubt about why your posting has not appeared. I appreciate all the time you've put into giving me feedback -- it's actually quite useful. Hopefully you won't run into this again before I have time to fix it.
Thanks for considering the feedback and tolerating my frustration.
When you say "what really should have happened" you are correct, as that is how my filters are designed. If you are blacklisted by my spam filter, you should see a message telling you such. [...] for some reason you simply didn't see the message.
I'm still not sure we're understanding each other. When you say "blacklisted", are you referring to getting the IP banned? Yes I did see the "Your IP address was recently used to post spam" message, but that's already step 7.
The point I'm trying to make is that this is too late; it takes two posts and a third attempt to see this blacklist message. It should be made clear at step 3, before the IP address is blacklisted.
Yes, sorry, I quoted the wrong message. Your first posting that was marked as spam would have generated the following message:
"The @type you posted has been flagged as potential spam. It will not be visible until the site administrator has a chance to review it."
That said, you're not the first person to not see the message, so obviously it's not prominent enough. When I originally designed my spam module I wasn't sure I wanted to give any notification, as I didn't want real spammers to have feedback. But in truth, most comment spam is automated, so feedback doesn't much matter. And the goal of all of this is to retain anonymous comments and a user-friendly experience at the same time (which is why I don't add Captcha's -- I think they're as un-user-friendly as it gets). So yes, I will address this shortcoming with my spam filters when I find the time to rework my system, and once again thanks for the feedback.
post here or email
You can post a comment in the forums (as you've done), or you can email me at jeremy@kerneltrap.org.
IP blocked?
Actaully a few days ago I was trying to post a message and suddenly the browser hangs. I pressed backspace to return to the previous page and suddenly it says - "this IP was used to post spam." I was not trying to post spam. Can you plase unblock my IP? Infact I faced this problem several times while posting to kerneltrap :(. My original post was from a different machine.
I can post now
I can post now!! I guess IP is blocked for certain days?
spam filter
Yes, I wrote an aggressive spam filter to monitor these web pages -- it's the only way I'm able to keep anonymous comments and forum postings enabled. Unfortunately it does occasionally have false positives, and does result in people being blocked that shouldn't be. That said, I do review these logs and when I notice non-spam in the spam-bucket I remove it and thus un-block that user.
The problem is compounded by a buggy PHP opcode cache which occasionally (~once or twice a week) causes problems with Apache which causes posting comments to randomly return a white screen. This makes people submit the same comment more than once, and this is immediately flagged by my spam filter... I'm reviewing alternative opcode caches in the hopes of resolving this annoyance.
The spam filter thing is
The spam filter thing is completely ridiculously broken! Over 50% of my posts have been rejected, and you cannot even go back and save the message because the thing will give you an "access denied" error.
You might as well disable comments in the first place, so people don't waste their precious time fighting this braindead spam filter. Furthermore, when attempting to "comply" and log in with a new user, I get "page not found" error.
Well, five minutes later,
Well, five minutes later, KernelTrap suddenly does not consider this message spam anymore: http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/BootUtils_Automatically_Detecting_the_Root_V...
Yes, I was thoughtful enough to save that comment prior to posting, but this is the first rewrite of the this comment.
On "spam" filtering
Well, five minutes later, KernelTrap does suddenly not consider this message spam anymore: kerneltrap.org/Linux/BootUtils_Automatically_Detecting_the_Root_Volume#comment-270095
Yes, I was thoughtful enough to save that comment prior to posting, but this is the first rewrite of the this comment.
But anyway, disabling comments also has the upside of stopping the trolling/flaming battleground that KernelTrap has degenerated into.
Err, apologies for the for
Err, apologies for the for the comment spam (which the spam filter "surprisingly" failed to catch), but those post(s) really did not appear the first four times I attempted posting them.
spam filter
Reviewing the logs, the problem you ran into was quite simple: your first comment was a rapid double post of an identical comment. That is very common for spammers, and hence the spam filter immediately highlighted you as a potential spammer. At that point, your IP address and all comments posted from your IP address are black listed until I have time to review it, usually the following morning (Eastern Time). Certainly frustrating for you once that happens, but the alternative is that I wake up each morning to 10,000 real spam messages cluttering the website. Yes, there really is that much spam being regularly posted. Unfortunately this also means non-spam occasionally gets blocked and I don't notice -- I continue to improve my filters to try and prevent this.
One work around is to create a user account -- if I notice that you're consistently posting useful comments, I will quietly mark your account and it won't be scanned by my filters any more.
Is it a perfect solution? No. Is it better than having a website filled with comment spam? I think so. Is it better than the frustration of trying to figure out the characters in a Captcha? I think so.
True, re-posting the comment
True, re-posting the comment is my first reaction when a recently posted comment does not appear on the page -- I assumed that it was eaten by code gremlins for good. Sorry about that.
I would suggest displaying a prominent message stating "Your comment has been received and is pending review", instead of simply not displaying the new comment without a hint of what happened to it.
prominent message
Yes, that is exactly what it does. A message appears at the top of the screen when your message is flagged as spam, alerting you that it will be reviewed by a site administrator. HOWEVER -- once you're flagged as a potential spammer, all future attempts to post result in a ~30 second delay. You likely ran into that, compounding your frustration.
I have to admit that I
I have to admit that I couldn't find the message even when specifically looking for it. (I even searched the page for any text including "comment" and couldn't find it.) If the notice really is there then you have done an excellent job at hiding it.
These kinds of notices should be in the center of the page, inside a thick red box with a warning icon, so that nobody would miss them.
the message
I hope it doesn't happen to you again -- but if it does, look for the box at the top of the screen. It will say:
Sounds like you're still not
Sounds like you're still not following. In an attempt to make it more clear here's the use case:
What really should have happened:
Notice how the third step differs? What do you expect Joe to think when his comments disappear without notice?
What really should have happened...
When you say "what really should have happened" you are correct, as that is how my filters are designed. If you are blacklisted by my spam filter, you should see a message telling you such. Granted the wording of the message could be improved, but that doesn't appear to be the issue at hand -- for some reason you simply didn't see the message.
I am planning to rework my spam filters quite a bit in the relatively near future, and I will take this into consideration. I will be sure that in the new version there is no doubt about why your posting has not appeared. I appreciate all the time you've put into giving me feedback -- it's actually quite useful. Hopefully you won't run into this again before I have time to fix it.
blacklist message
Thanks for considering the feedback and tolerating my frustration.
I'm still not sure we're understanding each other. When you say "blacklisted", are you referring to getting the IP banned? Yes I did see the "Your IP address was recently used to post spam" message, but that's already step 7.
The point I'm trying to make is that this is too late; it takes two posts and a third attempt to see this blacklist message. It should be made clear at step 3, before the IP address is blacklisted.
wrong message
Yes, sorry, I quoted the wrong message. Your first posting that was marked as spam would have generated the following message:
That said, you're not the first person to not see the message, so obviously it's not prominent enough. When I originally designed my spam module I wasn't sure I wanted to give any notification, as I didn't want real spammers to have feedback. But in truth, most comment spam is automated, so feedback doesn't much matter. And the goal of all of this is to retain anonymous comments and a user-friendly experience at the same time (which is why I don't add Captcha's -- I think they're as un-user-friendly as it gets). So yes, I will address this shortcoming with my spam filters when I find the time to rework my system, and once again thanks for the feedback.