Geeklog Forums

I've added Spam-X protection to Chatterblock and I'd like to test it.

Alas, Spam-X's log only reports IP addresses and the code the spam thanks to which the spam was catched, so can someone give me (based on the newest MT-Blacklist) a phrase or even just a word that should definitely trigger Spam-X and if it doesn't, something must have not worked?

Also, Chatterblock limits the message's text, which results in unfinished HTML tags (usually unfinished "a href"s). How does Spam-X handle unfinished HTML tags?

Thanks!

How about you simply add a spammy keyword to your personal blacklist? Spam-X doesn't care which module reports a post as spam.

Most of the Spam-X modules don't care about broken HTML - they do a simple pattern matching.

bye, Dirk

Oh, and if you activate the Spam-X email notifications, you'll get the full spam post in the email.

bye, Dirk

But the whole thing is I want to see if what my spammers use would be catched.

Seems like some spam keeps getting though. Mainly Google links. Actually, what bothers me most is the broken tags it leaves due to Chatterblock's cuttings. Sometimes those broken tags break the chatlog (thus I can't directly delete them) or even the phpblock.

But then again, if it bypasses MT-Blacklist, how come the same spam doesn't get to my stories' comments too?

All spam is treated the same, i.e. all posts (comments, stories, trackbacks, ...) are run through Spam-X in the same way. In fact, Spam-X doesn't even know whether the post it's looking at is a story submission or a trackback or whatever.

The only difference is that the new trackback code also does a check for backlinks, i.e. it checks if the site that supposedly sent the trackback is actually linking to you. That's something that Spam-X can't do (since it doesn't know what a trackback is). Therefore, this catches spam that Spam-X wouldn't normally catch.

The Google posts you mention are test runs by a certain trackback spammer, e.g.
Obviously, unless you want to block everyone linking to Google, those can't be easily blocked when they come in as a comment. But with the backlink check in the trackback handling, they are easily identified as spam.

bye, Dirk

Here's an example that always gets through:


But an example that actually breaks the page (at least the chatlog page) because Chatterblock always cuts it in the end) is:

[cut]

Guess what? The forum identified the latter example as Spam! How come Spam-X doesn't?!

I wonder how come the same spammer doesn't try to use this text in a normal comment. After all, it should come through there just as well.

That post contains several drug names as well as a URL that you could easily add to your personal blacklist.

bye, Dirk

(dug out of a spam notification email)


You seem to be confused. The forum uses Spam-X. The above contains the word "viagra" which is in the personal blacklist here on geeklog.net (and I can only use it since I've activated the Spam-X plugin's admin_override option).

May I suggest you go back to square one and take a moment to think about how Spam-X actually works?

bye, Dirk

Well, I didn't know it was on your personal list...

All I want to know is how come (given the default list) this spam appears only in Chatterblock and not in the comments.

Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying.

If your Chatterblock mod calls PLG_checkForSpam (which is what is called during a comment submission) and you have identical input in both cases, then of course you will get identical results ...

bye, Dirk

So you say, but in reality these recent spam attacks only appear in my Chatterblock and not in stories that anyone can comment in.