My wife attempted to post a comment and got the following error: "Your IP address (x.x.x.x) was recently used to post spam to this website. For this reason, you are currently not allowed to post new content. If you believe this is in error, please contact the site administrator."

There are several problems with this:

1) There was no previous spam posted from that IP address, so the message shouldn't have come up in the first place.
2) Her comment wasn't submitted and she wasn't given any indication about how to contact the site administrator. It would be better if the comment was submitted, but not published.
3) There doesn't appear to be any settings to configure this behavior

Comments

Zed Pobre’s picture

Zed Pobre commented

Check your spam_tracker table for that IP address to see what it thinks it is finding, e.g.:

select * from spam_tracker where hostname = 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx';

with the xxx replaced by the proper IP address. If you don't find anything there, either, there may be a bug.

The behaviour itself can be configured from admin/settings/spam under the option "detected spam postings before blacklisting IP". The entire point of this option is to cut resource usage and penalize spammers by just slapping them with a long delay and not triggering any further code or database calls.

junyor’s picture

junyor commented

I found three entries in spam_tracker matching my IP address. One was genuine spam content (posted after the original problem) and two were comments from my wife. Still, I can't see why it's happening.

Perhaps a way to configure the IPs in the blacklist is the best way to solve my problem.

jeremy’s picture

jeremy commented

I recommend you read the descriptions of settings on the spam settings page at administer >> settings >> spam.

By default, once an IP is guilty of 2 or more spam postings, it is automatically blacklisted. You can tune this on the spam settings page, setting "Detected spam postings before blacklisting IP" to a different value. Read the description of that setting on the spam settings page for a full explanation, and let me know if the text needs to be clarified.

Are the 2 spam comments from your wife identical? This usually is because the user (your wife, in this case) accidentally submitted the same comment twice. If this is too sensitive for you, adjust the "Maximum duplicate content" setting. Again, read the description of that setting on the spam settings page for a full explanation.

The proper thing to do is to go to the spam comment administration pages and mark one of her non-spam comments as not-spam, and delete the other one. The spam filter needs to be corrected when it makes a mistake (like any spam filter). If you do not correct these non-spam postings, she will be blacklisted until the "Expire spam after" logic kicks again.

Again, I highly recommend you read the descriptions of all spam settings, as this will give you a much better understanding of how the spam module works.

junyor’s picture

junyor commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Marking wontfix for now. If this happens again, I can at least look into what might have caused it with the information here. Thanks.