Wow. As some of you will notice in your nightly reports, we had a spammer discover how to actually make it as far as moderation from the web form. We actually didn't have any formal spam checking past that point, since SpamAssassin would add too much overhead to legit posts right now.

Don't worry about deleting the spam posts; I'm actually working on the real moderation tools now, and in the meantime I should have the nightly process sending a report that will separate anon/newbie posts from registered-user posts, which will help some in the short term.

Okay, the approval screen is more magic if you have Javascript. (And much less if you don't, but that's temporary.)

Celandra and Fudge, at least, seem to have some unapproved legit email amongst the spam, so you guys may want to go approve it (or delete it if it's something that got re-posted later, as most of Celandra's seem to be).

Overall, we're still tuning the Phoenyx' spam settings, so you'll see fewer getting through like this - eventually, the only stuff that should go there is first-posts from new subscribers. That still has the potential to be spam, but at least it shouldn't be the random drive-by email spam that we're seeing right now (the stuff that goes direct-to-moderation and only shows up in the nightly reports).

Hopefully, the new magic in the approval screen will make it less painful to keep the spam deleted out of there; it's still important to visit the moderation page regularly on the chance that a regular subscriber has accidentally posted from an unknown address.

Karen Cravens (Mod) wrote:

Celandra and Fudge, at least, seem to have some unapproved legit email amongst the spam, so you guys may want to go approve it (or delete it if it's something that got re-posted later, as most of Celandra's seem to be).

Those were those messages that wouldn't go away... they'd been approved, but they still show up in the list and even "Delete" didn't remove them. (You suspected a character-set issue, since they were both from ZonkPJ.)

I selected 'Delete' in this newly-magical version and they disappeared. I haven't checked to see if they're back, though.

to keep the spam deleted out of there; it's still important to visit the moderation page regularly on the chance that a regular subscriber has accidentally posted from an unknown address.

The email notification is very helpful here. I can usually tell just by looking at that if I have something I need to approve.

Hi,

This may or may not be bug report, but might be a request for a clarification on what's the best way to express URLs in the body of posts. I posted to the Kalyr playtest group earlier today, and my post contained a URL enclosed in angle brackets like this - - it came though in the email post, but the web forum ate the link.

Experience of other mailing lists show that many mail programs will interpret URLs as hyperlinks, but get confused by punctuation marks at the end, which they wrongly take to be part of the URL, prompting a stream of "That link you posted doesn't work" replies. The 'received wisdom' on some lists is that enclosing the URL in angle brackets will always work. But not, it appears, on The Phoenyx.

I wonder what happens if you enclose them in normal btackets, like this - (http://www.kalyr.com/weblog )?

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

Tim Hall wrote:

Hi,

This may or may not be bug report, but might be a request for a clarification on what's the best way to express URLs in the body of posts. I posted to the Kalyr playtest group earlier today, and my post contained a URL enclosed in angle brackets like this - - it came though in the email post, but the web forum ate the link.

Experience of other mailing lists show that many mail programs will interpret URLs as hyperlinks, but get confused by punctuation marks at the end, which they wrongly take to be part of the URL, prompting a stream of "That link you posted doesn't work" replies. The 'received wisdom' on some lists is that enclosing the URL in angle brackets will always work. But not, it appears, on The Phoenyx.

I wonder what happens if you enclose them in normal btackets, like this - (http://www.kalyr.com/weblog )?

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

Tim, *both* (actually all 3) url's you put in your post worked for me. I'm using Thunderbird to read mail.

Eris

Eris Reddoch wrote:

Tim, *both* (actually all 3) url's you put in your post worked for me. I'm using Thunderbird to read mail.

However, when I checked on the forum, I see what you mean, the url inside the angle brackets was simply not there. Parens worked, though.

Eris

Eris Reddoch writes:

Tim, *both* (actually all 3) url's you put in your post worked for me. I'm using Thunderbird to read mail.

Eris

Same here - they work in email (actually Clara.net's web-mail app) but the first of the three gets eaten by the Phoenyx web forum.

See here: http://forum.phoenyx.net/page/managers/main/00002802

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008, Tim Hall wrote:

This may or may not be bug report, but might be a request for a clarification on what's the best way to express URLs in the body of posts. I posted to the Kalyr playtest group earlier today, and my post contained a URL enclosed in angle brackets like this - - it came though in the email post, but the web forum ate the link.

Sort of.

If you do a "view source," you can see the angle brackets. It's just that the htmlizer hasn't escaped them properly, so your web browser interprets it as an HTML tag. Which, being invalid, it then ignores.

I'm getting ready to convert the whole database to Unicode, and in the process I'll re-htmlize everything, including escaping those so they'll appear properly.