[Helene Finidori]

Hi,

Despite having installed conditional captcha without activating akismet (i.e. all new commenters need to pass through captcha) we have been innundated by spam comments more than 300 in the past few days. The silly thing is I did a wrong move and deleted all the spam, so we can’t access them anymore.

I had statred it with Akismet active and saw nothing was blocked. I deactivated akismet and the problem is the same. Though on my dashboard, the log says conditional captcha has blocked 300+ emails. I think the problem is that despite the fact that a captcha is presented and not filled out, the comment still passes.

I have tried to post a test comment as a logged out person. I was requested to enter a captcha. I did nothing, and the comment found itself as a valid comment.

There has been a response earlier stating that if there were issues with pluggin catchas, Cbox could look to integrate one in the package… I think this could be a good idea, because spam is one of the major thing that would prompt us to change platforms if we can’t resolve it…

Thanks for your help.

[Helene Finidori]

Geez, we got 12 comments as I was writing this email! i.e. in the past 5 minutes!

And Conditional captcha has counted them all as blocked: “325 spam comments have been automatically discarded by Conditional CAPTCHA.”

 

[Helene Finidori]

Interesting to note that the admin does not receive the notification of the spam messages. i.e. my first logged out attempt was counted by catcha as a spam and i didn’t receive notification of it. My following ones I received a notification for as if legit… (validated by my first posting not counted as a spam for this particular matter…)

[Helene Finidori]

Hi Just received the following response from the pugin creator:

“If the plugin is saying it has blocked these comments, but they are still appearing, then it means that some other plugin/theme is overriding it. It is also overriding Akismet because there is no way Akismet can fail to recognise that many spam comments.

I am not familiar with CBox so can’t say whether that is what is causing the problem. One way to find out it to disable all plugins and re-enable them one by one until you find which one is causing this.”

Has anyone experienced problems with Akismet? Akismet not filtering? Or with other captcha o0r anti comment spam plugin? Before disabling all our pluggins, can any of the developers of the software here have a look at the code to see if there is a potential problem?

Thanks!

In the meantime, I will restrict the comments to logged in users.

[Helene Finidori]

Soooo….

I have disabled all plugins except the CBOX theme, enabled conditional captcha and the innumdation started again.

So the problem does come from the theme it seems!

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