[Plugin: BotBlocker] Accused me of being a spambot!

LLester, can you let me know what your wordpress URL is so I can take a look and see whats going wrong?

Here it is!

I’ve activated BotBlocker temporarily for testing. Here’s hoping I can make it permanent!

Lane

Llester, I was just able to leave a comment on your blog and it didn’t block me. Did it get flagged as spam by the plugin?

Thanks, Brandon! It behaved just right, so I’ll leave it activated and see if any bots get tagged. I have WP set to send me all comment submissions for approval.

Maybe it had something to do with my being the admin and submitting a comment. (?)

Lane

Lane,

Thanks for the feedback, I have added the Admin issue to my buglist and will look into the problem for the next version.

– Brandon

I also found myself unable to comment either from the front of my site or from the back end, so have disabled it for now awaiting what I’m guessing will be a bugfix on admin comments.

I’m very eager to deploy it permantently, though, because spam-comment storms on the thousands of posts on my site have resulted in cripplingly high CPU spikes at my server in the past, and I had to close comments on old posts. Akismet is great, but it would be better to block spammers from submitting comments in the first place — and CAPTCHAs are a UX nightmare.

sonofbruce,

Whats the URL to your wordpress blog, I’d look to take a look at it to help me resolve the issue, hopefully today in fact.

– Brandon

Hi Brandon, thanks for the prompt response. The site in question is Via Negativa. I’ve temporarily re-enabled BotBlocker with the default settings so you can take a look. Let me know when you’re done, please.

sonofbruce,

I just placed a comment on your site, it seemed to go through ok. However, I am going to still look into the admin issue today.

– Brandon

Yes, I’ve asked friends on Facebook to submit comments too and no one else has experienced any problems so far, just me.

Let me know if you need a list of active plugins I’m running or anything like that.

If you could list your active plugins, that would definitely help.

– Brandon

OK, here you go: Akismet, BackupBuddy, Clean My Archives, DB Cache Reloaded Fix, Google XML Sitemaps, Jetpack, List Authors, MediaElement.js, OpenBook, Organize Series, Post Snippets, Quote Collection, Random Redirect 2, Recent comments widget with excerpts, Subscribe to comments reloaded, WordPress Sentinel, and WP-PageNavi.

I also have CloudFlare enabled, albeit through my webhost (Dreamhost) and not through a WordPress plugin.

I am pushing an update to the server now, the bug has been fixed: admins & registered users were being flagged as bots.

Thanks for the help with debugging the issue.

Success! I can now leave and moderate comments. Bless you.