As designed Members can post on threads awaiting approval

[clackey]

Affected version

v2.0.10

We've had this happen twice where threads are "awaiting approval before being displayed publically" however members have posted on them before we could approve them. I've checked and double checked permissions and can't see how this could be happening. I tried to recreate it with a few test users and couldn't recreate but it is clearly happening as you can see in the images attached.

 

[Chris D]

What is the reason the posts were pending approval in the first place?

Was it manually done by a moderator, or a spam trigger, or do you have it set up so posts have to be approved?

 

[clackey]

I presume that it was a spam trigger. None of our mods set it to pending approval.

 

[Chris D]

If it was a spam trigger, could you find it in the spam trigger log?

I have a hunch that something made the spam triggers kick in after the threads were created. That could be an add on but it can happen with the software by default too.

If the content was edited (which seems to be the case as I can see the History link on the posts) if those edits were detected as being spammy then that could trigger the post to be unapproved and this could happen after posts have already been made.

The details of the spam trigger logs will help establish if that is the cause though as the time of the trigger would be some time after the post date.

 

[clackey]

So, looking at the logs it is strange that the thread was created at 7:06am (CST) but Akismet flagged it at 2:33pm CST. The last post on the thread was at 10:26am. Doesn't the akismet check happen when the thread is created?

 

[Mike]

It is checked when the thread is created, but it's also checked when it's edited. This means that whatever content they added triggered a false positive with it. It's very common for spammers to add their spam in an edit.

Once it's in the approval queue, we don't allow further edits to remove it (requiring a moderator to look at it).

So generally speaking, this is the expected behavior.

 

[clackey]

ah ok. so they came back and edited the post and added those links. makes sense.