Bug 240497

Summary: Website contact form rejecting due to spam content, yet no links or similar in message.
Product: Services Reporter: David Harrison <david>
Component: ForumsAssignee: Forum Adminstrators <forum-admins>
Status: Closed FIXED    
Severity: Affects Only Me CC: freebsd
Priority: ---    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Any   
OS: Any   
Attachments:
Description Flags
Image of error none

Description David Harrison 2019-09-11 10:02:29 UTC 
Created attachment 207375 [details]
Image of error

I just tried to use the web contact form to mention the issue in bug 240496.

The form rejected my message due to spam content. I'm at a loss to see anything spammy in there.

Please see attached.
Comment 1 freebsd 2019-09-12 13:36:55 UTC 
The form input action was flagged by an external spam detection system (plugged into the forums) called Akismet (which is a system that keeps track of millions of posts, comments, and user data on a wide array of forums and WordPress installations). 

Unfortunately, the actual trigger is not visible to users of the service, and the contact form is not part of our moderation queue, so we do not get the change to view the contact form input and actually approve or deny it (in technical terms: it is not exposed for moderation). 

See https://xenforo.com/community/threads/spam-trigger-log-moderated-post.90908/.

This was, clearly, a false positive.
Comment 2 David Harrison 2019-09-12 13:42:33 UTC 
(In reply to freebsd from comment #1)
Thanks for the explanation. If Akismet is beyond moderator control would it be better to close this one?
Comment 3 freebsd 2019-09-12 13:54:48 UTC 
Yes, there is really nothing we can do (and the forum software makers know about the issue and may mitigate it in a future release); Akismet may have the occasional side-effect, but by and large it is a very valuable tool to keep spam down. Thanks for reporting.