[ php-blog-Feature Requests-1596880 ] Spamblock: configuration for API failures

Feature Requests item #1596880, was opened at 2006-11-15 10:22
Message generated for change (Settings changed) made by garvinhicking
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Category: Administrative functions
Group: None
>Status: Pending
Priority: 1
Private: No
Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Assigned to: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Summary: Spamblock: configuration for API failures

Initial Comment:
40 out of the last 980 comments on my blog were rejected with "Akismet API verification failed: false" and the comments never made it to my blog. Akismet itself is working according to the spamblock log just minutes before and after a reject.

Please give the admin the chance to choose how to handle API failures (moderate/reject/accept). Maybe the API handling can be fixed to retry failed connections?

I am using s9y 1.1-beta5 with spamblock plugin 1.53 - contact me at [email protected]

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Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2006-11-16 12:12

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=473563
Originator: NO

This message indicates that the Spamblock RBL plugin blocked his message,
not Akismet. Thus, his IP *was* contained in the blacklist at the time of
his comment...

Maybe you need to contact the developer of the RBL plugin.... ;-) ;-)

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Comment By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Date: 2006-11-16 11:46

Message:
Logged In: NO 

Hi Garvin!

The comment itself looked clean (no URLs), the IP is not listed in
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org (which is used in my setup). However, Sebastian got
an error message and made a screenshot ;-)

http://blog.pommesbude.org/uploads/spamschutz.jpg

(hope it's OK to post)

Peter.

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Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2006-11-16 08:52

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=473563
Originator: NO

Hi Sebastian!

I guess that your message was blocked because of another reason, and the
Akismet thing just came on top of it. The code "break"s the
Switch-Statement if the Akismet-API returns a failure, thus the comment is
not set to a "true" spam...the way I read the code there's really no chance
that a comment should be denied because of this?!?

Do you remember which message you saw on the comment return page?

Best regards,
Garvin

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Comment By: Sebastian Nohn (nohn)
Date: 2006-11-15 20:02

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=79365
Originator: NO

In this case this is wrong. I was the commented and my comment did not get
through.

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Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2006-11-15 10:38

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=473563
Originator: NO

Hi!

Thanks for notifiying us about this. The problem is that we try to not
further clutter up the spamblock plugin with options for items like this,
especially because newbies already get confused about the settings we have
now.

However the way the spamblock plugin work is, only if Akismet API checks
succeed a message is triggered as spam. In your case, an API verification
failed will be logged - but the comment itself will go through.

Sadly we can only rely on what Akismet gives us back - if you get this log
entry it definitely means that Akismet.com did NOT accept your API key,
whatever the reasons.

Marking comments as spam based on Akismet failure is IMHO not a good thing
to do, IMHO. The default behaviour of any blacklisting should usually be to
never reject possibly valid data, which the s9y plugin does in that case.

A "retry" feature could easily garbage your blog because it would try
again and again, causing the connection to stay active for a longer time.
This could lead up to a DOS of your server...

Please understand that we cannot send personal notifications to email
addresses given in bugreports.

Best regards,
Garvin

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