WordPress MU

Another Beta Extension. Until Sept 15th around, so if you are getting expiry notices just redownload. I'll be releasing single user shortly for Beta testing too if people are interested.

finally :-)
can't wait for the single user version.

one more question though:

can I safely delete blogs marked as spam? they are cluttering up my DB and I guess after they have been processed by monty, he knows all the relevant data about those spam blogs, so there would be no need to keep them around, right?

oh, and what happens if a user marks a comment as spam? does that filter back into monty? I mean if there was e legitimate looking comment, that went through monty, but that user actually marks it as spam, does this filter back into monty?
I am asking because if you have hosted blogs posting in foreign languages, I can't always know if the comment is legitimate, so I just let it through, but if it is spam, I think it would eb good if user corrections would go back to monty.
Also if I mark a blog as spam (through the built in tools in wpmu, not through monty) does monty take that into account?

@ovidiu,
Yes, delete away with those old blogs!

If a user marks a message as spam then monty informs you, and asks you to look - although I think his message could be clearer! That will be updated.

@everyone,
I'm informed the update is not extending as I expected. I'm on it and will get a fix in 2-4 days.

Me & Monty

If your version is about to expire then download a new one. It will still say it is going to expire but will extend itself when the time comes.

I found out, on my test server that you're using short open tags ( <? ) rather than long ( <?php ).

Its not a big issue but it will catch people out if they've got short open tags turned off.

sorry to ome up with this old issue again, but monty is still ocasionally asking me to moderate my own posts. I hoped that you had incorporated an is_site_admin() check into monty so he doesn't bother with my comments/posts...

and how is the single wp version coming along?

@Steve,
Thanks for drawing my attention to that. I'll fix it.

@Ovidiu
Single user coming along. I should be able to pass it to you for testing in about 10 days.

The moderate admin issue is actually better to leave as it is. It is important that any post that scores between 10% and 90% (or 100%) is moderated. It means that Monty learns better not just for the admin but for all users. Also since it is important that the moderator has a chance to ignore certain style of posts this cannot happen automatically.

macgruder & monty

To up that a little bit, how about a check to see if the user making a comment is a user within that blog? Not a sitewide user as that could be a spammer but an user of the actual blog? I'm suggesting that check since the blog admin would have had to actually approve that person to be a member of that blog and I would think a spam check wouldn't be needed.

The site admin check would also be a plus.

"if the user making a comment is a user within that blog"
The danger here is that you have a splog - perhaps an old one that slipped by, and not everyone will have the splog settings such that there is this one time approval.
Since the 'challenge' is relatively rare especially for non-spammers I don't think it's necessary. And if the challenge occurs once or twice then that user will get approved by you and Monty will learn that user's patterns. It not so likely therefore that a user will get a challenge more than 2 or 3 times if they are a non-spam user.

The danger here is that you have a splog - perhaps an old one that slipped by, and not everyone will have the splog settings such that there is this one time approval.

That's why I suggested checking against the blog list of users and not the sitewide list. If the spammer wants to make spam comments on their own blog, let them. If a blog admin trusts a user enough to add them in as a contributor or higher on their own blog, a check shouldn't be done.

"If a blog admin trusts a user enough to add them in as a contributor or higher on their own blog, a check shouldn't be done.'

The issue here isn't about checking but learning. If Monty is unable to recognize that the user is a good user anyway then it's important that you teach Monty that this pattern is good. It's very unlikely that a good user is misrepresented as a spammer more than once or twice anyway.

On the other hand, you can't make this automatic because suppose a valid user wrote a message containing the word argiav (reversed!) perhaps in a message about spam itself then you need the option to ignore this.

In other words, checking known legitimate users has more benefits. (I would be interested to know how often any legitimate user has been checked especially if it's more than twice). In my experience, posters who have once been checked rarely get another rating above about 0.01 and so aren't checked again anyway making it a non-issue (let me know if this doesn't appear to be the case).

It occurs to me though that when Monty is still learning he still checks people in the 0 - 0.1 range - perhaps I can add a check so that members/admins are skipped in that case.

I've got 7 days left before it dies. I assume it dies gracefully and just stops working without breaking anything?

You should be able to download another copy near to when it's about to expire. Then on expiry it should add a few weeks. I've been overwhelmed with other projects so I've just been adding extra time.

However, I will hopefully be back on it soon.

When it expires it doesn't do anything, it just stops working. Let me know if you update your installation the time is not extended.

1. august, *cough*, any news on the single version yet?

I was just checking my php_error log and I'd recently re-installed montyspam.

I noticed this error:

[01-Oct-2008 14:14:12] WordPress database error You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'WHERE comment_id = 109' at line 1 for query SELECT comment_type FROM WHERE comment_id = 109 made by f8cb7cf9e

Now I think this is coming from monty as the previous error (which happened when I was re-installing) was:

[01-Oct-2008 13:29:04] PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function f8cb7cf9e() in /webstuff/canalblogs/wp-content/mu-plugins/montyspam.php on line 2

At Ovidiu
The single user version will be out soon (I hope!) Sometimes my real job takes priority :-)

At Steve,
Could you send me a zip of your files that you downloaded? My mail is in the text file with the download and I'll take a look what's happening there. Usually, these errors are connected with PHP installs that are different from mine, but it's good if I can track these down.

I installed about a hour ago, have had some very heavy splog signups the last few days....crossing my fingers...

Hey Caddy,
Let me know how it goes - either way. The thing to remember with Monty is that he needs to learn so you need to give him time to see both good and bad messages. In my experience, Monty is best at in this order
(1) comment spam,
to the extent that comment spam is simply no issue on my sites any more as well as the benefit of blocking spam ips immediately
(2) splog messages,
he catches them as effectively but the issue is more an interface one. (i.e. you don't want false positives for legitimate bloggers, and the Ajax of posting means its quite difficult to get a 'turing test' of any description)
(3) signups themselves.
some do get get through at this stage because of the lack of info to judge at the signup stage. I have a few ideas how to improve this. However, they'll be blocked by (2) when they actually post a message.

Macgruder & Monty

I downloaded a new zip today and replaced the files and its still reporting that it will expire in zero days

Wait another day and when it actually expired the message should change. Let me know if it doesn't.

Its changed to 5 days

But doesn't seem to be functioning as I've just had a pile of spam arrive!

Yeah, sorry. The timing was such that you expired just before another minor update is due. It'll be extended again. And while I'm at it I'll try to make the extension of time more transparent. Wait while I deal with it over the weekend.

Nothing should have changed since the last update except one minor bug fix I did today. You could try downloading again, and see what happens - what till Monday should be fine though.

I suspect what happened is that there was a period between when Monty expired, and when you visited the admin page. And during that period you got spam. That is obviously something I need to fix, so the update happens immediately rather than after the actual expire.

Has anyone else been recieving comlaints that the captcha page on commenting is breaking in IE?

the user tries to comment, and instead of getting the captcha page, IE displays a error website not found?

I will get version numbers etc off the user.

Hello,

I run a very small wpmu page. I am however beset with spam (guess there is a really good robot out there looking for blogs). I would love to run montyspam to control this. So I downloaded your code and followed the install.txt instructions. That is I copied the files as told. However when I log in as admin and hit site admin there is no montyspam option to click on and follow instructions. Maybe I am to much of a newb here, but I am stuck.

Thanks for your help, and for the work to control these horrible robots.

Also I tried the e-mail in the install.txt file but it returned undeliverable.

Mike

Hey Mike,
Try again with the email. There was a typo in there:
change
montyspam_net
to
montyspamnet

@ybrich,
Are you sure this is a Monty issue?

hello Gary, any news on the single version?

Hey Gary,

sent you 2 mails with some problems a couple of days ago.
Haven't heard from you since then. Did you get them?

Btw. can you please contact me? I'd like to donate or whatever, I have always had trouble updating and now monty wants to expire again in 14 days :-(

P.S. single version? ;-)

one more issue:

I write a new post, then monty asks me to check i.e. 6 posts. it seems to pick up different revisions or autosaves, although I have disabled revisions sitewide (by setting the option to 0) with this plugin: Limit Post Revisions Sitewide from wpmudev.org - any ideas how to stop this?