A url in this field contains the blacklisted domain ...'

[Dirk Meyer]

1.4
Mysql
Linux

When posting in a forum in a 1.4 I get this message when including links to external sites and strangely enough to internal files too. 'A url in this field contains the blacklisted domain ...' From doing some searches, at least two domains were not blacklisted from what I could tell.The problem is that it wont allow me to save the post.

In the site security section and both blacklist options not enabled, when I change the spam setting from 'advanced' to 'none' the message gets posted with the URLs in question.

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

Dirk, I can't reproduce this - does it happen every time you try to put any url into a forum post?

And it happens when you have both blacklist options off, and spam set to 'advanced'?

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Dirk, if you could tell us what the URLs were, it might help us reproduce the problem. Thanks.

[Dirk Meyer (dirkca68)]

Sorry for delay.

Seems to happen for any URL. Attached are two screen shots. Apache error log produces these two lines. I edited my ip and domain. Happy to lock for more log files but can't find them

my ip - - [20/Aug/2011:12:56:01 -0600] "POST /interaction/forum/edittopic.php?id=34 HTTP/1.1" 200 18832 "http://www.mydomain.com/interaction/forum/edittopic.php?id=34$
my ip - - [20/Aug/2011:12:58:12 -0600] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 24203 "http://www.mydomain.com/interaction/forum/edittopic.php?id=34" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac O$
$100101 Firefox/5.0.1"

[Dirk Meyer (dirkca68)]

second screen in which a forum post url points to a mahara.org forum post

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

Can't replicate so will mark as invalid. If someone can replicate this problem then feel free to reopen it and please give instructions on how to replicate.

[David (dbell-3)]

Exactly the same problem as Dirk in our mahara 1.7
Turned off both blacklist options and set spam to advanced.
Two URLs I tried to post into a forum today are
http://e360.yale.edu/
https://app.handprinter.org/
This has happened previously as well
Is it possibe this error occurs because we are using mahara in a windows rather than linux server?

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hello David,

I cannot reproduce the issue on the Mahara demo site. It is running Mahara 1.10 on Linux and Postgres and is not on 1.7, but the anti-spam feature looks up URLs in online databases. Thus, I wouldn't think it had anything to do with your setup.

does it happen every time that you try to use these two URLs?

Cheers
Kristina

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi David,

Looking at the code, the problem is that even if you turn off the Spamhaus and Surbl blacklists, "black.uribl.com" is hard-coded in place and can't be disabled.

If you don't want to run any blacklist checks, then you have two possible workarounds:

1. Set your anti-spam to "Simple". The only thing that Advanced does other than check those blacklists, is that it runs some DNS checks against any email addresses in the message.

2. Hack the file lib/antispam/AdvancedSpamTrap.php to remove 'black.uribl.com' from the list.

In the longer term... probably we should change the config for this, because it is misleading. I think probably what we should do is move the blacklists into a config-defaults.php setting. I'm guessing probably the reason it was done the way it is, is because dbl.spamhaus.org and multi.surbl.com have user agreements that you're supposed to look at before enabling them. But having tickboxes for those certainly gives the user the impression that unticking them should disable all blacklists, when in fact that is not the case.

[Christine Lampe (stinelampe)]

Hi guys,

We've got a new installation of Mahara 1.10 and this issue creates the ironic issue that it is blacklisting Mahara.org on our Mahara site! Can't link or deep link the excellent user manual anywhere on the site, even in plain text. Hopefully we can hack the code as Aaron has suggested, but not everyone has a tech who can do that, so I'd humbly vote for a change to the config. (I'm not the tech, I'm the tech-irritant/Mahara manager).

[Christine Lampe (stinelampe)]

(Kristina, where I come from, 'guys' includes you and me!)

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Hi Christine,

Are you specifically getting this error message?: "A url in this field contains the blacklisted domain ..."

I just took a look and neither mahara.org or manual.mahara.org is listed in any of the three blacklist databases that we check against.

So it seems more likely that maybe what you're seeing is the new user probation system. Which would instead give you this error message: "Sorry, newly registered users aren't allowed to post links. Please reword your post to remove any links or URLs and try again."

Please let me know which error message you're seeing.

Cheers,
Aaron

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hello Christien,

I assumed as much. :-) Hope you have time to check the exact error message.

Cheers
Kristina

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Mahara because there has been no activity for 60 days.]