I am logged in, (I double checked) and I've tried the past fifteen minutes to make a post in the Martin shooting in Florida thread but am not permitted by the server to do so. I get the automatic server reply that I am forbidden from posting. "Forbidden You don't have permission to access /forum/threads/martin-shooting-in-florida.68583/add-reply on this server." Forbidden You don't have permission to access /forum/threads/martin-shooting-in-florida.68583/add-reply on this server.
There's an issue that seems to be associated with the inclusion of links. I ran into it when some text I quoted from another site auto-inserted a link to the article I was quoting.
I wrote my narrative in MS Word and then inserted both a quote and the link from MSN into the Word Document. In that document I don't see any extra link other than the one from MSN. I then copied the Word document post and tried to copy it as a post. So what is the solution in the above circumstances?
Tried one last effort. I typed up the post in Word and did not copy any web content of any kind. It was just a straight Word Document but when I tried to post it I got the same forbidden error message.
There were some auto changes under the hood that I'm still working on correcting. Combine that with mod_security deciding to be picky again, and we begin to have fun. I'm aware of the issue, and am slowly getting things back to normal.
I'm going to do a bit of testing and disable the specific spam rule that your post triggered. See if you can post now.
Sorry, got your post too late. After making test post I tried copy and pasting the post again and had the same problem. So I then simply then hand typed it into the reply section and it posted. So I guess that doesn't answer your question. Is there anything else you want me to do at this point on the issue? The post that was being rejected was first typed into a word document along with the link from msnbc.msn. After the rejection I took out the link and then tried to copy, paste and post and again it was rejected.
Your post was being rejected as spam due to references to specific drugs. I disabled that portion of the spam rules to see if you could post it again. As an aside to everyone. If you're having issues posting and it's being rejected, I need the date and time that this happens. The logs are stored by date and time. By having the date and time that you had the issue, I can zero in on the issue a lot quicker.
Got it. Thanks. The following is a tongue in cheek comment linking my post to the drug issue. It is darkly funny that the drugs I mentioned in my post on the thread topic as being possibly detrimental to Zimmerman were being blocked by the filters on forum software before you made the adjustment.
It's not the forum software that was blocking it. It was being blocked at the server level by mod_security. The rules are very complex and designed to protect a wide range of products that the admin may be using.
If it involves computers on a "very complex" level than you know from a technical standpoint it is way over my head. Thanks for the education and heads up though.
For the layman, there are two (actually three) levels of security for this forum. Level one is the physical server itself. Level two is network, low level apps on the said server. Level three is the forum software and the database. What happens when you tighten up level 2 too much is what happened here. Biker always has to find the perfect balance and it really becomes an art form with this type of stuff. You don't want to do too little, you don't want to do too much.
The default rule set installed via cPanel is rather spartan. And while it served us well for a very long time, it was time to beef things up and bring the security of the server in line with today's standards. Which means constant vigilance of the logs and fine tuning for the next month or so. Still trying to track down an issue which appears to be .htaccess related. It's not affecting users, but the Google bot is tripping it on a regular basis which I need to fix before Google penalizes the site.
