1. Did you play with the Publishing Threshold and Deletion Threshold settings under the Global Settings tab?

2. You could empty the database table evo_antispam and just never update the antispam checklist

3. Back everything up first and look in the inc folder for the antispam folder and delete at your own risk.
I wouldn't do that as I have no appreciation of the consequences :)

4. You could also delete the basic antispan plugin.

Thank you for your reply. No, I did not play with the publishing and deletion threshold settings. I followed your suggestion number 2 and deleted all rows in the table evo_antispam. That makes it easy to revert back to the full list or manually select just a few very specific keywords to block if it feels necessary.

I'm a bit curious why the antispam plugin isn't included in the Global settings / Install plugins tab, which provides a convenient way to disable and enable plugins through the graphical admin interface?

The antispam subtab under "global settings" (with the thresholds) and the antispam keyword list (reachable from the antispam subtab) aren't actually plugins. They are part and parcel of the core. Perhaps they should be, but hey no worthy blog app can exist without active antispam methods.

Did you have a specific keyword in mind regarding "always block some valid things too", or is that just a general observation? We put a lot of effort into NOT blocking good stuff is why I ask ... although .blogspot.com is one that is known to occasionally block a non-spam referral.

EdB wrote:

The antispam subtab under "global settings" (with the thresholds) and the antispam keyword list (reachable from the antispam subtab) aren't actually plugins. They are part and parcel of the core. Perhaps they should be, but hey no worthy blog app can exist without active antispam methods.

I'm not against having various antispam methods available, but I think an easy option to disable them would still be a good idea. Even if the are part of the core there could still be a checkbox to enable/disable filtering (e.g. right next to the list of blocked keywords).

EdB wrote:

Did you have a specific keyword in mind regarding "always block some valid things too", or is that just a general observation? We put a lot of effort into NOT blocking good stuff is why I ask ... although .blogspot.com is one that is known to occasionally block a non-spam referral.

It's more a general observation. I find keyword based fillters annoying and especially dislike the possibility of censoring someone without knowing by using a central list. I was already once hit by the filter myself while writing a comment but cannot remember what the keyword was.

Anyway, now that you mentioned I took a look of the list so here are a couple of more specific ones which block valid contents:

buffalo.edu (a university home page)
plymouth.edu (as above)
tiscali.it (an Italian ISP)
angelfire.com (a free web hosting site)

That's just with a quick look. There are several free webhosts such as angelfire completely blocked - I'm sure there are plenty of spam sites under those but also valid pages.

I haven't had any extra spam coming since disabling the antispam filter a few days ago so at least for now I'm happy with my decision to drop it. I need to moderate comments - otherwise I do get plenty of spam. Without moderation spammers would get around the keyword blocklist anyway, so it has little value for me and creates a risk of blocking valid sites.

AJT

I just got the error when linking from Twitter / TinyURL.

That was a bit annoying but got through it.