Does http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=6971 relate and help? No solution but a known bug.

Hi EdB,

That's the problem I'm having! What should I do until they fix the bug? I've got spam referrals coming in like crazy!

Thanks for your help!

--Chris

What I've been doing is highlighting the offending domain and pasting it into the "check and ban" box on the antispam tab.

Is your antispam table up to date? Hope so since that can stop the flood.

Plus do a bit of human vectoring if you're flooded. Got bunches of various subdomains from the same domain name? If so then "check and ban" only the domain.tld portion including the preceding dot. It'll catch a heck of a lot more than doing the one by one approach.

Hi,

Now I'm getting comments from visitors who clicked on Technorati tags to get to my blog saying that they've seen the spam error mesages too. It's a serious bug! Does anybody know when they'll fix it?

Also, should this thread be moved to the Bug section of the forum?

--Chris

The only time the antispam thing kicks in is when something in the URL matches something in your antispam table. For example you accidentally banned yourself, or the title of a post contains a banned keyword and you have "Use extra-path info" enabled.

Got a link where we can see this happening?

EdB wrote:

The only time the antispam thing kicks in is when something in the URL matches something in your antispam table. For example you accidentally banned yourself, or the title of a post contains a banned keyword and you have "Use extra-path info" enabled.

I've checked many times to see if my name or portions of it have been banned but it doesn't seem to be. I check by filtering for portions on the antispam page, is that the way to do it?

Got a link where we can see this happening?

Unfortunately, the problem from Technorati seems to be intermittent, but the error message when I click the B2E graphic always gives an error.

cchris wrote:

I check by filtering for portions on the antispam page, is that the way to do it?

Yes - that would be the way to try to figure out which keyword is blocking the inbound traffic.

cchris wrote:

Unfortunately, the problem from Technorati seems to be intermittent, but the error message when I click the B2E graphic always gives an error.

Hmm... What page do you refer to when you say "the b2e graphic"? If I understand correctly you're not seeing this every time someone comes from technorati, but sometimes they do AND you've been able to duplicate this. I say that because you refer to you clicking the graphic. Can you show a tag in technorati that will include you and will not get past the antispam filter?

BTW you're using 1.6 and have extra-path enabled. That means it is possible that a term in a blog post can match a keyword in the antispam table. For example "pantyhose" is a keyword. If you blog about pantyhose but don't link to a URL containing pantyhose then your post will be okay but inbound visitors will get the 403 page. It sucks, but it's a known bug in 1.6 and the latest version of 1.7 that I'm using. Not that I have pantyhose in any blog titles, but that's not the point! The point is that if you can identify a specific post that gets blocked you can now ask yourself if part of the post title is the reason.

EdB wrote:

cchris wrote:

I check by filtering for portions on the antispam page, is that the way to do it?

Yes - that would be the way to try to figure out which keyword is blocking the inbound traffic.

cchris wrote:

Unfortunately, the problem from Technorati seems to be intermittent, but the error message when I click the B2E graphic always gives an error.

Hmm... What page do you refer to when you say "the b2e graphic"? If I understand correctly you're not seeing this every time someone comes from technorati, but sometimes they do AND you've been able to duplicate this. I say that because you refer to you clicking the graphic. Can you show a tag in technorati that will include you and will not get past the antispam filter?

D'oh!, I guess it would be helpful if I gave you that information, sorry. It's the b2evolution banner on the admin pages. When I click that it always gives the 403 Forbidden error. I've checked and re-checked and there's no toptechwriter or any combinations of toptech or techwriter keywords in the listing.

EdB wrote:

BTW you're using 1.6 and have extra-path enabled. That means it is possible that a term in a blog post can match a keyword in the antispam table. For example "pantyhose" is a keyword. If you blog about pantyhose but don't link to a URL containing pantyhose then your post will be okay but inbound visitors will get the 403 page.

So you've got a thing for pantyhose, eh? (Don't we all ;))

EdB wrote:

It sucks, but it's a known bug in 1.6 and the latest version of 1.7 that I'm using. Not that I have pantyhose in any blog titles, but that's not the point! The point is that if you can identify a specific post that gets blocked you can now ask yourself if part of the post title is the reason.

With thousands of words in the anti-spam listing, how am I supposed to know which word is causing a problem? Will the spam catcher flag words like "cocksure?"

I'm suddenly having the same problem, when I click the "b2evolution" link on my own admin pages (on www.tvotw.co.uk) I get the 403 error from b2evolution.net claiming the referring site (i.e. www.tvotw.co.uk) is a known spammer.

i'm not, honest!

Someone help me please!!

In both cases I can reach b2evolution by visiting your webs then using the linkback on your main page. That means it's not your domain that's being blocked, which means it has to be something else in the URL.

Does this happen when you are on the write tab then click the link, or from the antispam tab and have possibly just reported something? Cuz if this is the case then it's not unlikely that you've got a spammy term in your refering URL. Appended as parameters from the previous action.

It's the only thing I can think of in both these situations.

In my case, the first time I get it, I've usually tried to blacklist something - and get the 403 as a result of clicking the button to submit the blacklist entry.

Certainly weird, I'll try a more scientific experiment when I next get some spam and see if it'll fail again

You've hit on the bug exactly. Check your URL as you go through the banning process and occasionally you'll see the bad word in your own URL. Now try going somewhere else and you'll find yourself banned.

This is a 1.6 thing by the way. Never heard of it happening before 1.6.

Here's something I did recently that got me calling myself a spammer. I decided the 99 different blogspot blogs that are keywords were going to be ONE keyword, so I banned ".blogspot.com". I then filtered for anything that matched and started unbanning the 99 entries that have a specific blog. At first it was no problem, but when I went to the second page of responses I could no longer unban anything because the term I was filtering showed up in the URL.

Other cases will exist where you didn't spam but did end up with a 'bad' word in your url. Weird eh?

Just happened to me as I was checking keywords into my site:

the url:

http://www.4kidsnus.com/blogtest/index.php/disney/2006/03/16/p219

I'm using 0.9.1 ...