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Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
Hi guys,
I just don’t know what to do, comment spam is killing me these past few days. It’s like a spam comment every 20 minutes, and the interesting thing is it’s all on old articles. Now I have a problem, I don’t want to activate the “close comments after __” option because I have a couple of old and alive discussions on my blog, then I thought of comment moderating, and when I try to activate it — it spits out a 406 error page!?
Also I have these two comment spam prevention plugins — asy_stopdude and mrw_spamkeywords_urlcount. Neither do any good. I guess the second one would be good if it caught the keywords in the “name” of the commenter, because the comments themselves contain none of the keywords, just some stupid quotations, but the names are like “valium, cheap tramadol, etc.”.
Can anyone help here?
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#2 2006-09-27 09:29:26
- Neko
- Member
- Registered: 2004-03-18
- Posts: 458
Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
I was wondering if you modified in any way the TXP comments preview system.
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
Nope, everything is as it is in a default install. I didn’t hack anything.
One thing that comes to mind about these 406s is that maybe something got screwed up when I was migrating from a local dev server to the public one, but everything is functioning perfectly for months and I have just noticed this because I wasn’t using these fucntions. Is there any way I can check why am I getting the 406 errors?
The error message is: “An appropriate representation of the requested resource /textpattern/index.php could not be found on this server.”
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
The 406 error sounds to me like a problem with your hosts setup. Textpattern or PHP wouldn’t create such an error.
As for the spam: If you need somethin that works now, I suggest trying asy_captcha. You could also try the latest pre-release from the Testing forum (it has some new changes against spam bots). Other than that you could request specific types of anti-spam plugins, e.g. porting of the more “succesful” ones from wordpress or s9y – Although so few people (fortunately) seem to be affected by comment spam, that up to now there has been (unfortunately) only a very limited interest in anti-spam plugins.
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
Is there something in particular I can ask my hosting provider about that error? Is TXP doing anything specific and the server is set up in such a way so it won’t let it?
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
Just to check: You are getting the error when submitting the preferences form? No, nothing special is being done there. It is possible, that this is a case of “arbritrary” neutering for the sake of security as explained in this FAQ: http://textpattern.com/faq/89/412-precondition-failed
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
Yes, the error appears when I try to submit the form. I’ll let my admin know about this and then I’ll let you know what it is all about.
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
Sencer, I just got info from my server admin, the problem is indeed in mod_security and the characters in the URL that aren’t allowed. Is there any way I can get around this?
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
Check their documentation or ask them whether you have the option of turning it off for certain directories. If they do not give you that option, you should consider how much abitrary limitations you are willing to put up with before changing hosts (would you consider living for rent in a flat, where you are disallowed to use the doors and instead should use the windows to move from room to room?).
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Re: Txp Spam and a (separate) eror 406 problem
I believe these measurements are not permanent, but because there was some kind of an attack on the server recently. I think this mod_security thing will be removed in the future, but the problem is I kind of need it now to fight this spam that’s been hitting me recently.
Is there any way I could hack the URI the form uses so it passes just for comments moderation option?
Thanks for all your help so far Sencer.
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