Enterprise spam protection, incomplete and not as sold

[Dll]

After being sold the enterprise spam service on a ticket and pointed towards the announcement on the company blog in June for details,('?do=embed' frameborder='0' data-embedContent>>), I have to admit that we're really disappointed in the fact that it's not actually complete, and were only told this after we'd paid.

This is the section from the blog

Enterprise Spam Mitigation
If you are in a load balanced or cloud environment, you may wish to take advantage of this new offering which allows calls to the spam service from multiple origins using the same license key. Additionally, this service allows greater control over your spam mitigation service including weighting algorithm preferences and customized blacklists and whitelists. This addon service is available for $100/6 months. For more information, please contact our sales department.

The product does work but doesn't yet include any option for changing weighting preferences or black/whitelisting. I don't really understand why it would be announced as having these features if they weren't ready, I also can't see why 5 months later it's still not complete or why it's being sold as if it is. What's going on with it, and when can we expect the product we've paid for to be available in it's entirety?

[Dll]

Any chance of a response to this please?

[Lindy]

I'm sorry for the delayed response due to the holiday. The big advantage to the enterprise spam mitigation was the ability to use it in a clustered environment. Something not typically possible with the standard offering. There are minor differences on the backend, however, the blacklist/whitelist has not materialized as of yet - I apologize. We will address that this week.

[Dll]

Thanks for your reply.

As another piece of feedback, I think this service actually does a slightly worse job at blocking spammers than the SFS hook unfortunately, perhaps more weighting towards their database may help?

[bfarber]

There is a tradeoff - with using purely open services (like Stop Forum Spam) you are also going to see more false positives. That is, more legitimate users who are not necessarily spammers will be flagged than through our proprietary service.

We do use information from SFS as one data point in our weighting already and will continue to adjust algorithms as needed.

[Dll]

I disagree to be honest, having tried them both I've seen no situations where SFS flags positive, and many situations where the Invision system misses very obvious spammers who have been listed in SFS and ProjectHoneypot many times.

Also, the implementation of the spam flagging is very messy within the AdminCP at the moment, flagging a user as a spammer when viewing the validation queue only seems to remove them from the queue, you then have to reflag them within the normal member view to get them properly moved into the spammer group, and the same applies the other way around as well..

[bfarber]

Also, the implementation of the spam flagging is very messy within the AdminCP at the moment, flagging a user as a spammer when viewing the validation queue only seems to remove them from the queue, you then have to reflag them within the normal member view to get them properly moved into the spammer group, and the same applies the other way around as well..

If that is happening (I don't know, I don't tend to flag validating users as spammers as I can't typically know they're a spammer until I've validated their account and given them access...) I would recommend posting a bug report. I'm not sure I would say "the implementation of the spam flagging is very messy within the AdminCP" due to that, however. It sounds like you've just discovered a specific bug that can be addressed in the next release - it's not a major flaw with the implementation itself.