Message Board

Bugs & Development

Website bugs

Author: A.H3 (5 Feb 05 10:06pm)

1) When viewing your website using the Mozilla browser (a nightly build) the background of the submenu (containing "FAQ", "Message Board", "Harvesting Law", "Model Terms" and "How to Avoid Spambots") disappears when moused over. It seems, that this problem can be fixed by changing line 63 in "/css/hp.css" from "div#navlinks ul ul li a:hover { border: 0; background-color: transparent; }" to "div#navlinks ul ul li a:hover { border: 0px solid; background-color: transparent; }" (that is, change "0" to "0px solid").

2) The links to "[ Older Posts ]" and "[ Newer Posts ]" shown at the top right, when viewing individual threads in this forum, seem to have their functions reversed.

Edited to add couple of suggestions:

1) Maybe it should be possible to mark posts in this forum as private, either because the contain "sensitive information" (such as honeypot domain names or urls) or (as is the case of this post) doesn't contain information interesting to others than the admins :) .

2) In the "Top Harvester User Agents" statistics (at /statistics.php ) it might be interesting if you added an extra column containing the spaminess of the user agent. That is, something like <number of hits that resulted in spam>/<number of hits>. Of cause, since the honeypot scripts shouldn't be visited by normal browsers, the MSIE-like user agents would probably get a very high spaminess factor.

Post Edited (5 Feb 05 9:37pm)

Re: Website bugs

Author: M.Prince (6 Feb 05 1:26am)

Yikes! Thanks for pointing out the CSS bug. I wasnt' able to replicate it with my version of Mozilla, but I changed the hp.css file per your suggestions. New version should be up now. Try viewing the pages (as I'm sure you know, you may have to shift-reload in order to force it to load the new version of hp.css). Let me know if the bug is gone.

The Board code is hacked together from some other open source projects. The newer/older links behave strangely if there's only one page of comments. I think they work as you'd expect if there are more than one pages. I'll look into fixing that.

Not sure what the result of a message being marked private would be? Would it then only be viewable by members? Since we don't restrict very heavily who can sign up (and I know that some spammers already have) I'm not sure how much security that would provide. But it may be worth it. Again, the limiting factor may be the codebase of the Boards. Since we didn't write them from scratch, but hacked them into our existing account system, modifying them is sometimes tricky.

We're talked about scoring Top Spam Harvesters based on a more sophisticated algorithm than "last seen." We're still trying to come up with ideas. Hadn't thought of "spamminess of the useragent," as you suggest. Will definitely think about how to implement your suggestion.

We'd like to also build into the equation factors such as "reach" (how many honey pots the harvester hit) as well as "damage" (how many messages result from this particular harvester having stolen your address). We're not quite sure how to quantify and rank all the factors in a way that makes sense. We're experimenting offline and, if we find something we like, we'll definitely release it to the site.

Thanks again for the great feedback and catching the CSS bug!!

Re: Website bugs

Author: A.H3 (6 Feb 05 5:38am)

You seem to have solved the CSS problem (at least I can see the submenu now). I hope it didn't break it for to many others. But since you had not seen it before, I guess it was a mozilla bug rather than a CSS bug. There still seems to be a problem when a submenuitem have fucus, so the background disappers when you tab through the menu and after you click a submenu item (but at least now I can see the item before I click :) .

I don't think it has anything to do with the number for pages of comments. As I said, it was the links shown when viewing the individual threads (a page such as the page you a reading now). At least I observed the problem when catching up in the groups.

An other issue/suggestion:

You might want to explicitly state on the sign up page that neither the e-mail adress or first name will be shown in to forums (I wondered about the e-mail adress, and just thought that some people might have left out their first name when signing up).

Re: Website bugs

Author: M.Prince (6 Feb 05 6:24am)

Good idea re: signups and what data is displayed in the forums. I'll look into the newer/older links some more as well as what remains of the disappearing menu CSS bug.