Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

Since moving JapanSoc to HotaruCMS about 48 hours ago, I've added 32 spammers to the StopForumSpam database and have four pages of them on my "Blocked List". I usually get hit by the same spammers again and again, so hopefully once they're all banned, things will quieten down a lot.

Now that I'm getting some real spam to test Hotaru's numerous anti-spam features on, I'm uncovering a few issues that makes zapping spammers less fun than it should be. First of all, the email notifications of pending posts and comments had no information in them other than a link to the post edit page or Comment Manager. That would be fine if you wanted to go to those pages and click "Delete", but what we really needed was a link to the User Manager page so you could delete and ban the user along with their posts. I've now done that by including all details in the email. Here's an edited example of the new "pending post" notification email:

Hi Nick

A new post has been submitted at JapanSoc

Post Status: pending
Post Title: Title
Post Content: Content
Post Page: Link
Edit Post: Link
Post Management: Link to posts with this status, in this case "pending"

User Name: user name
User Role: member
User Email: User email address
User Account: Link
User Management: Link to users with this status, in this case "member"

Thank you,
JapanSoc Admin

That means I can easily go to User Management and zap the user, having seen the post content in the email body. Alternatively, of course, if it's not spam, I can go to the Post Management page and approve the post.

So while that helps a lot, there's still another problem. What if you come back to your machine and find 30 spam posts waiting for you, submitted by 30 different users? Of course, you can set all new users to "pending" when they register, but at that stage you don't yet know if they are spammers or legitimate users. Assuming you're putting the first X posts into moderation, what you really need is to be able to check the box next to all the spammers in a list and zap them all in one go. The User Manager has such a list, but you need the Post Manager page open in another tab so you can see which users submitted spam, and which submitted ham. Checking back and forth like that is somewhat tedious, so I'm going to work on that and see what I can improve. The biggest hurdle is that User, Post and Comment Managers are all independent plugins, so if we want to tie them in with each other, we have to do it with plugin hooks, and that's quite a challenge.

This is where my focus is right now, but I'll try to find time on Sunday to move what we've got sitting on the SVN 1.0 branch to the trunk.