Arthmoor

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

No need for AI, they just need to incorporate support for Akismet. That's already wildly effective even for first time posts. It's why I keep pushing on this every time the subject of what to do comes up.

My basic point is that Akismet would never have allowed those airline spammers everyone is getting hit by to post anything, even right out of the gate on a fresh account. The current system in IPS appears to be almost entirely defensive/reactive in nature and has proven wholly ineffective at handling the problem.
Even when setting up hCaptcha at "difficult" level, the problem remains. The only other advice I've seen you guys or anyone else give is to pay $20 for the CleanTalk app. While I'm sure that's an effective solution, it's one that raises the expense of running the package as a whole and not all of us want to do that.
If there's something more you guy have to suggest on the subject, I'm sure we'd all appreciate knowing.
I've been using Akismet for years on non-standard packages it wasn't even meant to be used on, and it's proven solid and reliable. Spammers have yet to succeed in bypassing it for posting, and only occasionally get past it for initial account registration.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

This is where the Akismet proposal I suggested comes into play. The spammers will indeed be known because the system will have detected already. They don't rely on waiting for assaulted forum admins to mass report things. Their algorithm is good enough to detect it on the first encounter in nearly all cases and then everyone using the same system benefits from that.

It's a long standing issue with IPS and their "anti-spam" that doesn't actually prevent spam. Even with hCaptcha.
It would be better to press them on enacting my suggestion from January when I got hit by the same spammers:
 
The other often mentioned "solution" is to spend an additional $20 to install ClearTalk, but IMO one should not require additional paid apps to run an already expensive package.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

It's a long standing issue with IPS and their "anti-spam" that doesn't actually prevent spam. Even with hCaptcha.
It would be better to press them on enacting my suggestion from January when I got hit by the same spammers:
 
The other often mentioned "solution" is to spend an additional $20 to install ClearTalk, but IMO one should not require additional paid apps to run an already expensive package.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

Get IPS to implement this:
 
Akismet is extremely effective and costs nothing to use. It would be a win-win for IPS and everyone who uses it.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

sorry Daniel, but this is NOT a third party issue. This is an engineering problem inside the framework. This was an issue reported/showed up almost 2 years ago and u guys did nothing to fix it or even comment on it, it was left up to me to debug it and come out with a solution. This is a good example of us using features of php (and of IPS) and since the framework is still mostly a pho 5.3 framework, it not playing nice with the modern versions. This is honestly the kind of nonsense of why I left.
These are not third party developer issues, don’t let IPS TELL U THEY ARE. these are issues caused by an engineering problem with in the framework as demonstrated by the topic Adriano linked too. They are eval’ing a non extended class to check for errors or something like that and that is where it throws the deprecate notice in 7.4 and the fatal in 8.0+. Put IPS’s feet to the fire, demand better from a software company that charges $300 a year for renewals for mediocre improvements and many years of outstanding bugs they ignore or refuse to fix.

I did, hence why I linked it here. Maybe more interest in the suggestion will help nudge it along. Besides, I think I made it pretty clear what I was linking when I said "get IPS to implement this".

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

Better yet - get IPS to implement this:
There should be no good reason to have to spend additional money at the price the IPS package sells for. Especially when a solid working anti-spam system exists that's easily implemented into the package.

Better yet - get IPS to implement this:
There should be no good reason to have to spend additional money at the price the IPS package sells for. Especially when a solid working anti-spam system exists that's easily implemented into the package.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.

We're not Xenforo. It'll be quicker than that.

The theme errors were resolved once the upgrade process to 4.7.6 was done.
The RFC 3339 errors have not been, and are still flagging in the ACP as being frequent. They also don't appear to be theme related in any way. All I can gather is that those have something to do with DateTime issues and that they only seem to happen on the login page.

@Randy Calvert Randy, it's great that you're so active, but you're a customer like all of us, so let the IPS Team write something, because you act like their spokesperson or someone who knows more than us, and you know as much as we all do, which is nothing.

I've been getting these "-200" errors ever since updating to 4.6.x and I'm pretty convinced it's due to the fact that the upload progress bars are not working. This is in turn causing the browser to lose communication with the server if the upload is large enough. If the upload takes too long then it triggers the error.
This never used to be an issue with 4.5.x because the progress bars worked fine there and it didn't matter how big the file got as long as it compiled with the limits set in the ACP on the particular category.

Yep, another downloads module issue. It would be really nice to be able to get some way to drag & drop uploaded screenshots and place them in a new order. Right now there appears to be no way to guarantee a particular order to screenshots associated with an upload.
I'm sure it seems like a silly thing to want, but people uploading stuff to showcase their work often have a certain order they'd like things in.

Yep, another downloads module issue. It would be really nice to be able to get some way to drag & drop uploaded screenshots and place them in a new order. Right now there appears to be no way to guarantee a particular order to screenshots associated with an upload.
I'm sure it seems like a silly thing to want, but people uploading stuff to showcase their work often have a certain order they'd like things in.