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[RobertoBozzolo]

I understand what you say and indeed it does make sense: and for the reasons Lily explained before, if I'm fallen into the trap of a filter trying to be too smart (  ) I won't probably get more details than these.

This means I'll add a task more to my forum activity:

• Look for new threads
• Search which post got answers, solutions
• Search which post was kudoed / marked as solution
• Check if delayed content has been approved 
• ...

Just to make things clear,  I'm not complaining at all: I'm happy as you that our forum is not flooded with spam! 

[LiliMcDonald]

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RobertoBozzolo wrote: Hello Lily, yesterday I posted a reply in a forum thread and I was warned that it will be published only after approval. My post however had no link inside, only text so I wonder if I felt into this issue too or what else could have happened. And if the spam engine marked it I would like to know what could be rising it's attention! As a side note, I was given a link to a page where contents waiting for approval should be present, but no item was listed there. Finally,  I didn't suceed to find such a link later when I was monitoring the forum and my post still was not published: is it present in some profile page?

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Hi Roberto,

Based on the other topic you reported (text height changing while posting), I'm wondering if your post that ended up in the Spam Quarantine also had the odd HTML issues before you edited it? If so, this is most likely the reason the system flagged it as spam. As explained here, additional or unnecessary HTML can sometimes set off a flag for spam as this is often found in legitimate spam posts.

As for what you say occurred after that, it sounds like a module that exists which contains "all of my items waiting moderation" but this is not something we expose to users. Did you see this message / link on the forums in an error message or error page?

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altenbach wrote: Everybody who has been around for a while can agree that the antispam measures have significantly improved. While we had daily runs of hundreds of spam posts, the frequency has dropped to nearly zero. As a side effect there are rare cases of false positives, such as in your case.Detecting spam is dealing with a fast moving target and, as I understand it, the filters auto-tune. So once a suspicious post is approved, the filters are automatically adjusted accordingly. Looking at your post, it is a mystery why it got trapped. One problem is that Lithiium runs forums for many big companies (Verizon, Lenovo, etc. ) and the filters are thus not very aware ot special NI techical terms found in your post (CVI2009, DAQmx). In combination with several terms sometimes found in spam (definitely, perrfectly, constantly, multiple) might have pushed it slightly over the edge. Maybe Lili can ask Litium to investigate and possibly do some manual adjustments.

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Thanks for the reply, Christian.

The spam system has definitely saved the forums from seeing thousands of spam posts in the last year. It's not perfect, but it does learn as users continue to report spam and as we identify the false-positives that get trapped by the system.

I would like to clarify though, that while the forums don't recognize product names by default, this affects the spellchecker but not necessarily the spam system. We also don't get affected by what other Lithium customers choose to identify as spam -- because what may be considered spam in one community may not be in another. 

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altenbach wrote: Others have mentioned that posts of seasoned members with many gold bars in their badge (such as you!) should get a significantly higher threshold. Hopefully that will be implemented at one point. (So far the spammers have not tried hacking existing accounts and there are probably good mechanisms in place to prevent that).

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Unfortunately, the spam tool isn't evolved enough to have thresholds, so we're limited to a "yes or no" option for users to get checked by the spam system.

[RobertoBozzolo]

Hi Lily,

unfortunately I didn't focused on thos details while I posted. The text height issue was probably present since in this case I would have nnoticed it, but I cannot be sure about that.

As per the "moderated content" page, I seem to remember that I was presented that page automatically after posting, and when I dismissed the page viewing anothe one I was no more able to see it.

[altenbach]

Personally, I an not sure about the HTML triggers. Did you componse the answer directly in the forum page or did you compose it elsewhere and then pasted into the edit window. As long as you compose the message right in the forum, there should not be any rogue embedded HTML code.

The way I understood, is that the font change happened randomly. Maybe it has to do with using a tablet. What was the OS? Maybe you have very high resolution and it adds more font scaling, for example.

[RobertoBozzolo]

Hi altenbach, you raised a good point: every time I zoom on the tablet screen, the editor adds text height parameter! The fact is that writing with fingers is not so handy and targeting the buttons on the format bar is not so easy, so I often zoom in and out. As far as I can see this happens only with lists:

• Zoom in
• Zoom in again
• Again
• Again
• Text enlarges
• Now let''s zoom out
• Text remains large

When I terminate the list, text restarts with normal height, as you see.

Coming to your question, I always use the forum editor to post messages.

[LiliMcDonald]

Hi Roberto,

I'll keep the convo about the text size issue to the other thread -- no news as of yet.

As for what occurred the other day, after some investigation, we know what happened.

1. You made your post to the topic.

2. You immediately edited the post. During this time, the system marked the post as spam.

3. After saving, you saw a message saying, "you will be notified through a private message if your post has been rejected or approved.' You were provided a link to a page for "My Unmoderated Items." This page is typically available to users when they are waiting for a moderator to approve their posts, for instance, in situations when all posts are moderated before appearing on the forums.

4. You didn't see anything on the My Unmoderated Items page, because the default tab is your pending items, whereas since your post was in Spam Quarantine, it would have appeared on the My Rejected Items page.

This is different from the norm because you edited your message. If you had never edited the message, the post would have gone to Spam Quarantine and you never would have seen any message or taken to the My Unmoderated Items page.

As for why the post ended up in Spam Quarantine, it is still not clear but most likely due to the html + verbiage.

Thanks,

[RobertoBozzolo]

Hi Lili, thanks for taking time to address this item. Indeed it happens to me sometimes that once I see a post published I notice something to correct and edit it immediately (we have a limited amount of time to edit posts, which I translate as "immediately or never"  ). This means that the post was initially published and possibly the anti-spam system was fired by the final text after modifications.

Oh well, I don't think analyzing more and more this matter makes any sense: I was surprised by the new page I never saw and now at least I understand that it can happen sometimes.

Keep on with the good work you and your colleagues are doing in keeping this forum on the right path!