Contact form + Spamblock bayes

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yellowled
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Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by yellowled »

I use the Spamblock bayes plugin, and apparently, it is making it impossible to use my contact form.

That sound's weird, right? Test it. Go to http://yellowled.de/kontakt.html and try to send an email as “Test user” using “mail@example.org” and “This is a test” as email and message. You'll very likely (please say so if not) get an error message (especially in Firefox, apprently) which is related to Spamblock bayes saying the mail was rejected as spam because name, email and message must no be empty. (Yes, they are required fields in the spamblock plugin, but they are not empty.)

As soon as I remove the Spamblock bayes plugin, this works. So it must be related to bayes, right?

I can even see why it is detected as spam with this data. I probably at some point marked something with similar tokens as spam. Seems reasonable. But apparently, this happens for other domains as well – Don just yesterday failed to send me an email via the contact form, and he did not use fake test values. And again, I can see why that would be the case with Bayes – my blog is in German, the filter is probably trained to reject a lot of .com and .org domains alone because of spam, let alone “test”.

Two questions though:

1. Why does it say that fields are empty when they're not?
2. As far as I can tell, with the contact form, I have no means whatsoever to “react” to spam. These emails (even the ones that go through) do not (seem to, at least) appear in bayes’ trashcan, they are not being learned, they are maybe not even analyzed? Yet the bayes filters are being applied, and the plugin does not have an option (which I think it should have) to exclude the contact form.

Or am I completely getting this wrong and I need to delete my bayes db and train the frigging thing from scratch yet again? (Seems like I just did that yesterday.)

YL
MarioH
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by MarioH »

I recently had a similar Problem: http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=20506 (Thread in german.)

I could not solve this. I only use the "normal" Antispam-Plugin on this site.

Regards
Mario
onli
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by onli »

I just uses the form with other data and it seemed to work fine.
1. Why does it say that fields are empty when they're not?
I don't know that. Could be that the bayes plugin sets something the other plugin interprets wrong.
As far as I can tell, with the contact form, I have no means whatsoever to “react” to spam.
That's probably true. The bayes plugin can catch comments. The function to get a comment and store it in the trashcan probably simply fails here.

The plugin would need an update.
yellowled
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by yellowled »

onli wrote:I just uses the form with other data and it seemed to work fine.
It does work fine with other data, I just gave the example data to make it reproducable.
onli wrote:Could be that the bayes plugin sets something the other plugin interprets wrong.
Could it be that it just emits the wrong message because there is not a more specific one? By that, I mean that the actual (spam) trigger is something entirely different, but the plugin emits the wrong message.
onli wrote:The bayes plugin can catch comments. The function to get a comment and store it in the trashcan probably simply fails here.
Right – as much as I appreciate the possibility to apply spam filters to a contact form, it does not do any good if I'm not able to classify mails as spam or ham and learn them, which is vital for a bayes filter.

YL
Don Chambers
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by Don Chambers »

Still a problem today... I re-created the exact form a few moments ago that was rejected about 14 hours ago.... same problem. Message says fields cannot be empty, which they clearly are not. I suspect the error message is being triggered by something other than the plugin truly thinking the fields are blank.

Image

Disregard the highlighted text in the screenshot - that text happened to be highlighted as I took the screenshot - it is not part of the form submission.
=Don=
yellowled
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by yellowled »

Don Chambers wrote:Still a problem today... I re-created the exact form a few moments ago that was rejected about 14 hours ago.... same problem.
As said before, I'm pretty sure it's the bayes plugin considering the content of the email to be spam but responding with a misleading message. Also, I turned logging back on for the spam plugins this morning.

Code: Select all

2016-02-03 08:20:23] - [REJECTED: Vom Bayes-Plugin als Spam erkannt] - [#0, Name "Test user", E-Mail "mail@example.org", URL "", User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0", IP 91.8.201.237] - [Firefox test]
[2016-02-03 08:22:56] - [REJECTED: Vom Bayes-Plugin als Spam erkannt] - [#0, Name "Test user", E-Mail "mail@example.org", URL "", User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.11; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0", IP 91.8.201.237] - [This is a test]
That's two tests I made myself this morning.

Code: Select all

[2016-02-03 19:57:38] - [REJECTED: Vom Bayes-Plugin als Spam erkannt] - [#0, Name "don chambers", E-Mail "don.chambers@optional-necessity.com", URL "", User-Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0", IP 50.129.218.59] - [This is the exact email I tried to send yesterday/early this a.m. […]
That was you just now.

YL
yellowled
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by yellowled »

onli wrote:The bayes plugin can catch comments. The function to get a comment and store it in the trashcan probably simply fails here.
Hold on to your hats, the last email Don tried to send via the contact form (the one that I listed from the logs above) actually did land in the bayes trashcan!

And it has a spam rating of 97%, which makes sense because my trashcan threshold is set to 98%. So we can probably assume that all the test emails and Don's previous email(s) got at least 98% and thus got rejected. The only issue is that the plugin states that fields were left empty. (Well, and that my bayes filter assumes English text to be pretty much spam.)

I guess I'll have to lower the trashcan threshold, huh?

YL
yellowled
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by yellowled »

yellowled wrote:The only issue is that the plugin states that fields were left empty.
Well, not quite – I can actually restore the email from the trashcan, but (of course, I guess) it does not get resent as an email, it gets restored as a comment. I could work with that, but it is not exactly user-friendly …

Edit: … and also I just realized that I can not delete that restored email as a comment. I can mark it as ham or spam using the bayes buttons, but it can not be deleted. (Although there's a confirmation message that it got deleted.)

YL
onli
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by onli »

The deletion process will fail as it is not assigned to a real entry. I'm surprised it was even possible to add this as comment – to what entry is it assigned, really to none?

Yeah, you need to lower the barrier. With the honeypot and everything before bayes that maybe is not too bad. The english text problem won'T go away though, when 99.9% of all english comments in your blog are spam.
Don Chambers
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by Don Chambers »

YL didn't mention that I also tried to send him regular email, which I have done for years from my primary email address, to his. Those emails were also rejected. Do these plugins report to any blacklisting services?

The exact response I received to my emails was this:
[Return Code 554] sid: DbYb1s00H1HUxh601 :: Refused. Your IP address is listed in the RBL at ix.dnsbl.manitu.net
=Don=
Timbalu
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by Timbalu »

Now we know: Don is a SPAMmer... :), since ix.dnsbl.manitu.net is a serious RBL by heise.de! A very trustable service here, over the pond! These S9y spamblock Plugins do not report this to any RBL, ... as far as I know (but maybe Uberspace listens on mail() somehow?).
Regards,
Ian

Serendipity Styx Edition and additional_plugins @ https://ophian.github.io/ @ https://github.com/ophian
Don Chambers
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by Don Chambers »

Yeah. That's me. A real spammer. I think I sent out a whole 10 emails in the past week!! :lol: :lol: :lol:
=Don=
onli
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by onli »

Do these plugins report to any blacklisting services?
Bayes does not. This should be unrelated.
yellowled
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by yellowled »

onli wrote:The deletion process will fail as it is not assigned to a real entry. I'm surprised it was even possible to add this as comment – to what entry is it assigned, really to none?
Yes.
don chambers in Kommentar #604 - Antwort zu am Feb 3 2016, 19:57
Now, if you look in the source code, you'll find

Code: Select all

<a href="http://yellowled.de/archiv/0/unknown.html"></a>
which does not exist.
onli wrote:Yeah, you need to lower the barrier. With the honeypot and everything before bayes that maybe is not too bad.
I don't use the SpamBee plugin anymore, it didn't really help much. I know it works well for others, but it did not for me after a certain amount of time. I use bayes, than spamblock, but only very few features of spamblock.
onli wrote:The english text problem won'T go away though, when 99.9% of all english comments in your blog are spam.
I know. It is probably also a matter of the amount of ham vs the amount of spam. I get ridiculous amounts of spam and not many comments.

YL
yellowled
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Re: Contact form + Spamblock bayes

Post by yellowled »

Don Chambers wrote:Do these plugins report to any blacklisting services?
There is an RBL plugin for serendipity, but I don't know if it only uses RBL blacklists or if it reports back – because I never used it.

YL
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