Fri 09 Nov 2007 10:05:45 PM UTC, comment #2:
My initial report was based on insufficient testing, and i think
i now have consistent, repeatable behaviour.
SIDE COMMENT: To test this,
remember to try a spam expression with a minimum of 7 characters,
since that is what we put in order to exclude expressions which
are too generic. i say this because the arch.thinkmo.de/cgi-bin/spam-merge
spam list includes at least one expression with only 6 characters.
This was ignored by antispam.rb and (today) got me confused.
Given all the sorts of various things people might want to write
in some long text, i think that a spam expression of 6 characters
could turn up by accident in genuine text. Anyway, back to the
main issue of this bug report...
WHAT WORKS CORRECTLY NOW:
i'll write this as my recommended patch, which
i tried to make as
short as possible while also being reasonably clear, even if
it's not a technically full explanation:
EXPLANATION:
Some people put entries in the big wiki-spam list such
as
even though most entries have their dots escaped.
The effect is that text such as "examplexcom" or "examplescom"
is detected as spam - since the dot is the regex dot with a
special meaning, not a literal dot.
Most probably the non-escaping of these dots
are unintended errors. They probably won't
have much chance of excluding non-spam stuff in practice, but
the expressions catch more "spam" than is intended.
One genuine article that got treated as spam on a live
samizdat site contained the URL of a website which was on the
wiki-spam list with this unescaped dot.
Hence, in the samizdat defaults.yaml or <site>.yaml
exclusion list, it had to be excluded with example\.com
rather than example\\.com, because
gives nil
while
gives 0 (the expression is found starting at character 0).
For main spam list entries with escaped dots, the samizdat
config exclusion list needs to have a doubly escaped dot,
as in 070818-1, which i now think is correct.
RECOMMENDATION:
So now i just recommend the syadmin hint patch above since
i don't see any short term realistic way of getting the
main wikispam list "cleaned" upstream (i.e. dots escaped unless
they are genuinely intended to be unescaped).
i've switched the status to "works for me".
PS:
As another
side issue (long term issue), if someone knows which discussion
list or wiki page is used to discuss/update the arch.thinkmo.de
list (or knows a "better" list), then please speak up. i looked
around a bit but didn't find it.
|