Review - spam - publish issues

[vozmed]

Hello,

After using Phoca Guestbook for some time, I still suffer from a lot of spam.
Version used at the moment is 1.4.5 and Joomla 1.5.24.
Ip filtering, captcha, url filtering, review , ... it doesn't seem to work for me.

Despite the information on human spammers etc, I cannot understand how spam messages get published even if the review option is on and registered users only.
review messages are sometimes sent to the user set in the control panel but sometimes to an address not even set in the component.

Somebody who has got a few minutes to take a look at the backend and give me some hints to improve it?
PLease send me a pm.

Info will be posted afterwards to assist others with similar issues.

Thanks in advance

Guy

[evandroprieto]

I have the same problem. I try everything described at https://www.phoca.cz/documents/3-phoca-g ... -from-spam

And my website continues receiving a lot of spams.
My question to experts is: Its not possible that Phoca Guestbooks has a bug that permits the spammer to include the post directly in database

[Sushi]

I have the same problem. Every security feature enabled and still spam messages. Even with forbidden words and those words still get posted.
Apparently the spammers can give a direct insert in the database.

[Jan]

Do you have the latest version 1.5.0? (beta seems like without any problems, so will be moved to stable)

Jan

[vozmed]

Hello Jan,
Thank you for your reply.

Joomla was updated to 1.5.25 en Phoca Guestbook to 1.5.0 bèta a few days ago.
Still nog change. Only a few messages a day but annoying not knowing how they bypass the phoca guestbook config options.

[Jan]

Hi, then all other parts of Joomla! needs to be checked - if there are no problems with accessing tables.

Did you set the itemid parameter? Are security settings set in global configuration?

[vozmed]

Hi, then all other parts of Joomla! needs to be checked - if there are no problems with accessing tables.
Did you set the itemid parameter? Are security settings set in global configuration?

Options are set in the component configuration, not through the the menu item options.
The session suffix was set, but apparantly, the menu-item id was not the correct one anymore
Just changed it . I'll let you know how it goes from now one.
thank you for repeating the security settings in the manual once more.
If the incorrect itemid is the reason of the spam getting through, I'll print 'RTFM ' on a very large paper...

Guy

[vozmed]

unfortunately, no luck. Items are being posted/inserted into the database without any review & including urls.
Hopefully, the reason for the security measures not working properly are found easily.

jan, If you want an affected site for your investigations, feel free to send a pm for login details.

Thnx for creating and working on joomla components !

[phenry]

have you checked your database via myphpadmin and did a mainentance?

[vozmed]

thank you Phenry for your suggestion.
i did a quick check of the database and removed some outdated tables & disabled unused plugins at the backend.
Fingers crossed, again ...

Update : no luck ...