Sciencemadness Discussion Board

trying to make new post

starlight_ - 7-11-2018 at 10:45

Hi All,

I've tried to post a couple of times.

Post seems to show up and then disappear within 1 minute

My account doesn't seem to show up in the member list either

Anybody got any idea what's going on please?

MrHomeScientist - 7-11-2018 at 11:34

Just guessing here, but maybe the underscore at the end of your username confuses the site software?

fusso - 7-11-2018 at 11:48

Only members with at least 1 post show up in the list.

maybe the board software thinks i'm a spammer

starlight_ - 7-11-2018 at 11:50

Just joined today and made a post with three outgoing weblinks in it.

Could that be it?

j_sum1 - 7-11-2018 at 11:57

Quote: Originally posted by starlight_  

Just joined today and made a post with three outgoing weblinks in it.

Could that be it?

Possible. Quite likely even. This would be the first reported false positive on a new anti-spam system we are running.

What was the content of your posts?
Were your links to sites commonly used on this board?


Now that your post-count is past 1 post, try again.
And welcome to the board.
Do take the time to read the FAQ, read some threads and get used to this board's culture and style. We are a bit different from many other boards out there.

[Edited on 7-11-2018 by j_sum1]

starlight_ - 7-11-2018 at 12:55

Thanks j_sum, I will try again without modification of the post and we'll see if that now works.

fusso - 7-11-2018 at 12:57

And Melgar could analyse it a bit to see what happened.

starlight_ - 7-11-2018 at 12:57

I've attached the offending post as a text file

[Edited on 7-11-2018 by starlight_]

Attachment: offending_post.txt (7kB)
This file has been downloaded 659 times

starlight_ - 7-11-2018 at 14:23

Looks like it was the spam filter. Hopefully fixed by Melgar now.

streety - 8-11-2018 at 17:35

I'm glad it worked out and you stuck with it.

My understanding is this just the second false positive.
Quote: Originally posted by Melgar  
Yes, so far just that one, and that was because of a glitch in the way links were checked against the whitelist. I PMed him and told him what happened, and included the text of his post in case he wanted to repost it. I don't think he's been back in a few days though. Once I fixed that glitch, it no longer got flagged. Really, the scrutiny is just a lot more on recently-registered users, especially when posting links. His link would have been whitelisted though, had the whitelisting been working correctly at the time. I also raised the threshold for what gets deleted and added a few more conditions that can trigger additional flags. The "linking from unrecognized domain" flag has really been a key predictor of spam, by a long shot. And the "registered today" flag too, just because it focuses on the narrow subset of members who post 99% of the spam.

The algorithm has worked flawlessly, actually, it's just a stupid bug in my code that was responsible for that one false positive. :P


Oddly, it looks like the offending URL in this case was to patents.google.com

starlight_ - 8-11-2018 at 23:51

Thank you Melgar.

Your change got the post through.

I tried to make another different post that got blocked the following day. The contents I sent you by U2U. In the end I got this second post through by removing the link it contained.

Melgar - 12-11-2018 at 13:12

Now that you've been registered for two days at least, you should have an easier time posting. Though, I'd avoid using sci-hub mirrors, just because there are so many of them and new ones are always replacing older ones, so there's a very good chance that the domain won't be recognized. I'm not sure why patents.google.com wasn't on the list. The only thing I can think of is that the whitelist I compiled only goes up to 2016, and maybe google changed the way they list patents since then? Well, it's on the list now.

It might help to know that only new threads can be automatically deleted, so you can always add to an existing thread if you're having this problem in the future (or anyone else is). Then your response is 100% safe. Also, once your account is two days old, your threads aren't given quite as much scrutiny as they are during the first day or so. And there's a lot less scrutiny once you no longer show up on the first page of this list anymore:

https://www.sciencemadness.org/whisper/misc.php?action=list&...

So bottom line: link to the actual journal, not sci-hub, and you should be just fine. :D