Serendipity Forums

A blog that I setup almost a year ago now started getting attacked with spam the other day. I enabled and configured Spamblocker with no problems, but now when someone tries to post a comment, I'm getting the Permission Denied error in PEAR.php on line 848.

As recommended in this forum, I have contacted my service provider and they do in fact have a firewall on outbound connections. They tell me they can allow whatever specifics server connections I need, but I need to supply them with the server names and ports.

I have searched the boards but haven't been able to find the answer to this for Spamblocker. What servers / IP addresses and ports do I need them to allow to make the Spamblocker function correctly and allow people to post comments again?

any help would be greatly appreciated. thank you!

Jeff

me, too. seems to be sporadic.

Hi!

Which options did you enable in your spamblock plugin? It very much depends on which things you enabled.

You might need to disable any type of rever IP checks, like "check if my url is contained on foreign pages that send a trackback to me". Also you need to disable any Blacklist, SURBL/DNSBL things. If you're using blogg.de blacklist or Akismet, you need to whitelist their IPs in your firewall.

HTH,
Garvin

uninstalled it and reinstalled it. Seems to be working fine now. I think.

Prior to uninstalling it, I diabled captchas. Without captchas it seem to work fine, too.

I disabled any of the spamblocker functionality that checks to outside services, and changed my CAPTCHAS to "NO" instead of "SCRAMBLED" and now I get a more complex error:

Warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: unmatched parentheses at offset 24 in /home/u2/robian/html/cblog/plugins/serendipity_event_spamblock/serendipity_event_spamblock.php on line 899
Permission denied
Notice: Permission denied in /home/u2/robian/html/cblog/bundled-libs/PEAR.php on line 848
Permission denied

I'm not sure what it would be trying to access now that I need to unblock with my service provider, and I have no idea what the new first error message is relating to. please help!

Hi!

The preg-Error can happen if inside the spamblock configuration you entered invalid regular expressions for the "body text filter" or "content text filter". If you use "(" or ")" inside your patterns, you must escape them to "\(" and "\)".

The "Permission denied" can happen if you enabled remote server checks in the spamblock configuration but your server is not allowed to connect to a server.

I twould be best if you tell us which settings you enabled, then I can tell you which ones to fix/turn off.

Regards,
Garvin

I actually removed the plugin and reinstalled it, and now it's working fine. The only thing that doesn't work right is the CAPTCHA so I've had to (unfortunately, because we'd like to use it) disable it.

No matter if the captcha response you put in is right or wrong, it denies the post every time saying it was incorrect. I've tried it upwards of 30 times, each time making sure to enter the right CAPTCHA, and it denies it each time.

If we could just get that working right, I think we'd be fine with the base level of protection, blacklisting, and captcha.

Hi!

Do you have your browser's cookies enabled when you try to enter the captcha? What's your URL, could you enable captchas and let us see it?

You might want to temporarily enable logging of the plugin to file/database, there you can check which captcha input the plugin expects, and what you actually entered.

I'm quite sure this is simply a cookie issue.

Regards,
Garvin