Spam filter triggered by empty comment title

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robertgarrigos's picture

I'm having problems with one of my comments to a post which is not spam and cannot see the captcha either, so I'm getting blocked. I found that leaving the title empty trigger the error, so filling the title with any text skips it. I used to fill in only the body of the comment as drupal fills in the title automatically. However, this is not happening now.

Comments

Thanks ... we are using the

moshe weitzman's picture

Thanks ... we are using the stock mollom module and mollom service. Perhaps your can pursue this bug report there.

I acknowledge that these false positives are very frustrating. Mollom reporting indicates that we get many more false positives than positives. It is worth considering removing mollom, IMO. Yet even a few spams are very bad on this site because they get echoed via email after immediately to all subscribers.

Thanks. I checked the issue

robertgarrigos's picture

Thanks. I checked the issue list for Mollom and there is actually an issue on this: http://drupal.org/node/353588.

Funny enough I'm having this issue again while posting this very comment :-) However I cannot fix it like I did it before by filling in the title myself :-(


Robert Garrigós
Professional site: garrigos.cat

I eventually succeed by not

robertgarrigos's picture

I eventually succeed by not previewing the comment before saving it


Robert Garrigós
Professional site: garrigos.cat

Confirmed

apperceptions's picture

I came to report the same issue. It appears that using preview will cause a reply to be classified as spam and no submission is possible. I got around it by not using preview.

As I posted in the mollom

robertgarrigos's picture

As I posted in the mollom issue list, this is a little more complicated that not using the preview. Dries has commented on that issue (http://drupal.org/node/353588) about a nee version of the mollom module which would help on track this bug which I'm already getting fed up (I cannot just edit a post by adding a new group, so no text change....). I wish I could check the logs to be able to track this bug.

Any chances to get the dev version of mollom module and permissions to check the log registry on gdo? It would be great.


Robert Garrigós
Professional site: garrigos.cat

try irc

greggles's picture

We keep the log entries short to improve performance. I've bumped it up to keep them longer as a temporary measure.

The best bet to debug this is whenever you run into it try to find josh_k, moshe_work, or greggles on irc in #drupal-infrastructure or #drupal-dev and we will do our best to help solve this. It's as annoying to us as it is to you, but it's our best solution so far.

I'll try to catch you on irc.

robertgarrigos's picture

I'll try to catch you on irc. I'm haviong this nasty problem when adding more fields in a poll form :-(


Robert Garrigós
Professional site: garrigos.cat

Should be fixed

Dries's picture

We spent some more time looking into this, and we believe we fixed the problem in the Mollom backend.

To fix this problem, we made some improvements to the Mollom module the first part of the week. That let us to discover an issue with the Mollom backend that we fixed the second part of the week.

All g.d.o users that were incorrectly blocked actually had a high user reputation (i.e. trusted by Mollom), but they still triggered the spam filter because they posted the same content a number of times in a short time span. We have adjusted our algorithms to be less aggressive.

@robertgarrigos et al, sorry for the invonvencience. We're more than happy to look into problems you run into, so don't hesitate to bring problems to our attention. It might take a few days to get them debugged and fixed, but we'll fix them.

@greggles thanks for upgrading the Mollom module and feeding us with some cases to look at.

Thanks Dries. I definitely

robertgarrigos's picture

Thanks Dries. I definitely noticed the fix. great! :-)


Robert Garrigós
Professional site: garrigos.cat

Thank you, Dries!

Cliff's picture

It has been noticeably better since those fixes. With everybody working frantically until freeze, removing this source of irritation is a major improvement.

frankcarey's picture

I'm still being hit with a captcha EVERY TIME on g.d.o no matter what i post. Is there some was to investigate this, or higher authority i can appeal to? It's really annoying.

actually not ;)

greggles's picture

I went back through the logs for as long as we keep them. In it you posted one really short comment which was flagged as unsure, you entered the captcha, and then it went through. Then you posted this comment which was let through directly. If it is happening over and over

Consider the alternative solutions that people have proposed of using the ReCaptcha module - in that case you would have to enter a captcha on every single page.

If this is happening more often then that please follow the debugging instructions posted earlier in this thread - hop into irc and point it out to someone with the ability to review the watchdog logs so we can get the session ID values and report it to Mollom so they can debug it.

Consider the alternative

christefano's picture

Consider the alternative solutions that people have proposed of using the ReCaptcha module - in that case you would have to enter a captcha on every single page.

reCAPTCHA doesn't necessarily have to display a CAPTCHA every time. The CAPTCHA module (which reCAPTCHA depends on) has a "CAPTCHA persistence" feature that can make it just once per session. See line 170 in the captcha.admin.inc file.

Personally, I'm disliking Mollom more and more. It could just be that Mollom is not configured properly on this site, but I seem to type in CAPTCHAs here more than all the other sites I go to combined. I've deleted a lot of junk on groups.drupal.org in my spare time recently and it's more important for me that this site works than having the community crowd source the testing and development for a for-profit company.

(Companies like the New York Times do actually pay to have reCAPTCHA digitize their old works, but I don't have a problem with that. Practically speaking, reCAPTCHA has the CAPTCHA persistence feature that this site dearly needs.)

It seems I'm unable to post a

christefano's picture

It seems I'm unable to post a poll with more than two options. Clicking the "add another item" button triggers Mollom and prevents me from being able to submit the form. It also doesn't show a CAPTCHA.

Please don't ask me to file a bug report with Mollom. I've already done that. I'm reporting it here because I'm tired of Mollom preventing me from using this site. Enough already.