Third party Erroneous stopforumspam actions

[Stuart Wright]

I think this might be a bug which has been around a while (like a high number of months).
And we have a few anti-spam addons which might be getting in the way.
But we occasionally (like maybe once a week or more) get a user registration moderation queue item because of stopforumspam which reports the number of instances of the email or IP or username from SFS as 255. Which is a significant number in the computing world.
And example from just now.

I checked the email address on SFS and there were no hits. Which makes me think that maybe there is a bug here?

 

[Chris D]

This is very odd.

This is (similar to) the URL we use in API calls to SFS:

http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?f=json&unix=1&email={INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS HERE}

Give it a try with some email addresses, for example your own, and you'll see something like:

{"success":1,"email":{"frequency":0,"appears":0}}

Put in that user's email address (I was logged on to your Admin CP anyway for something else), and you'll see something like:

{"success":1,"email":{"lastseen":1440347479,"frequency":255,"appears":1,"confidence":99.95}}

So that's where we got the 255 from.

This is where it gets intriguing - notice the spelling mistake on his email address @gmai.com rather than @gmail.com. Try any email address ending in @gmai.com

http://www.stopforumspam.com/api?f=json&unix=1&email=literally_anything@gmai.com

This always comes up with a frequency of 255.

I suspect that it's something specifically related to the email domain rather than the specific users. Perhaps @gmai.com is a well known spam domain, therefore they have completely black listed it. Unfortunately, it's clearly a common typo so there will be no wonder why it crops up so often.

There isn't anything we can do, however. We just take actions based on the response we get from Stop Forum Spam. It may be worth reporting this at their forum, though, as clearly there's plenty of scope for this to be problematic - but at the same time if they've done something to blacklist that domain, it's unlikely they'll do anything about it either.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Thank you Chris. I suppose I could manually fix his email address if I value his membership.
Pity there is no way to send another confirmation email.

 

[Kevin]

Pity there is no way to send another confirmation email.

With XF 1.5 you can....

XF 1.5 - Miscellaneous improvements

 

[Stuart Wright]

With XF 1.5 you can....

XF 1.5 - Miscellaneous improvements

Blast. Can't upgrade until we have decent control over tagging.

 

[Xon]

Blast. Can't upgrade until we have decent control over tagging.

What sort of extra permissions do you need?