Concise error messages in case the local server time is not synchronized with universal time

This might be of interest, my hosts just upgraded a patch to the server for my site so that the time is now automatically synced to eliminate the frequent invalidation of Mollom API keys that has been happening since my upgrade to Mollom 7.x-2.0. They told me they have multiple Drupal sites on that server but that mine was the only one with a Mollom API key invalidation problem. Up until now, my hosts had watched the server time and tried not to let it stray more than one minute either way, but apparently they had not been monitoring it closely enough to keep the Mollom API keys validated.

Significantly, my site was the only Drupal 7 site on that server. The others had no problems running Mollom in Drupal 6, even with a time offset. So, I'm wondering if is possible with Mollom for D7 to make it not quite so sensitive to the time offset, for the benefit of people who do not have access to auto syncing of server time? Or, is there some other difference between the way Mollom for D6 works versus D7? To repeat, in our instance, we had the same server with multiple sites running Mollom, and the D7 site failed frequently while the D6 sites did not. Also, it seems odd to me that I ran Mollom in D7 on this same server from November 2011 to mid-spring 2012 with zero problems. It was not until immediately upon my upgrade to 7.x-2.0 that the frequent invalidation began. Just thought this might be of interest. Thanks for all your help, sun.

Okay, now I understand. Thank you. I wonder if we should add information on the Mollom module page to alert new users that the server they use must be synced precisely? This might help avoid confusion in advance. My hosts are large providers of Drupal hosting with thousands of sites, and some of their servers are automatically synced and some aren't, so even the big hosts might not always be up on how important that is for Mollom beginning with 7.x-2.x.

Wish I could help, but I don't have system access. If you wanted to contact my host directly for help testing, it is Kurt Vanderwater and his staff, kvanderw, also on IRC #drupal-oklahoma. He might remember encountering this issue with my site and others back in June.

Update: This was a server time offset problem. My host just fixed it from being 7 minutes off. No specific error message was showing up with dev installed, so maybe this patch isn't working?

Review:

• My site had a server-time offset invalidation in June 2012.
• My host fixed this on the server.
• Everything worked fine until January 15, 2013.
• So, I installed Mollom 7.x-2.3+9-dev to see if I would get an error message about a server time problem (even though my host was supposed to have fixed this).
• All I see is the following:

TYPE	 mollom
DATE	 Tuesday, January 15, 2013 - 12:37
USER admin
LOCATION	 http://fashionbelle.com/admin/reports/status
REFERRER	 http://fashionbelle.com/admin/reports
MESSAGE	 Invalid API keys.
Error 401: Invalid authentication.

Request: POST http://rest.mollom.com/v1/site/31f7e1a1b384843df2e340f88ada861f
  platformName = 'Drupal'
  platformVersion = '7.18'
  clientName = 'Mollom'
  clientVersion = '7.x-2.3+9-dev'
Request headers:
  Accept = 'application/xml, application/json;q=0.8, */*;q=0.5'
  Content-Type = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
  Authorization = 'OAuth oauth_consumer_key="31f7e1a1b384843df2e340f88ada861f", oauth_version="1.0", oauth_nonce="88ec9f6b37691c8dadf18ba4671ed0eb", oauth_timestamp="1358275051", oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1", oauth_signature="cKzf2VI%2BcCq2E2VIpPnpyhkDD0E%3D"'
Invalid API keys.

SEVERITY	error

There is no message about server time. So, is it a server time offset problem and the patch didn't work?

Strangely, I also noticed that even though I have Mollom set to block all form submissions if Mollom is down, I am still getting tons of spam comments getting through my forms, dozens every minute. This has never happened before.