I have valid users (including some low level admins) who occasionally get blacklisted, and have trouble getting back to being able to post. It would be great if there was a way to whitelist specific users.

Comments

AlexisWilke’s picture

Which filter or content do you have problems with?

Thank you.
Alexis Wilke

mandclu’s picture

I don't know that it's one filter in particular. I'm currently using the Bayesian filter, Duplicate filter, and Spam URL filter.

The solution I'm looking for is not specific to a single filter, but a way to generally designate users as not needing to be checked for spam.

AlexisWilke’s picture

Are the users getting blocked when commenting? Or also submitting content?

I'm asking these questions because that will give us a better idea of where/how to handle the situation. The whitelist could be a generic feature or a filter from what I can tell. If it is a filter, we could have it happen early on so other filters don't get a chance of blocking the content, but maybe not first so you could do the opposite too (i.e. give a chance for say the Duplicate filter to check for duplicates before checking out the white list.)

Thank you.
Alexis

Jeremy’s picture

You can assign the 'bypass filters' permission to a role to whitelist users that shouldn't be scanned.

AlexisWilke’s picture

Jeremy,

I'm wondering whether a white list would not also be a good idea. The bypass filter is good but requires the user to be logged in.

Thank you.
Alexis

gnassar’s picture

Jeremy beat me to the comment. We have this functionality already as the "bypass filters" permission.

How would a user whitelist help for a not-logged in user? Seems like the user would have to be logged in one way or another when he creates the content.

AlexisWilke’s picture

@gnassar,

A webform is one case where anonymous users can fill out a form and click Send.

Another is the Contact Us form.

And of course, all the sites that accept comments are likely to accept them from anonymous users.

This is why I was asking the user what content as well because in all those cases Anonymous users are able to submit content.

Thank you.
Alexis Wilke

Jeremy’s picture

What then is being white listed? An IP address?

AlexisWilke’s picture

For comments it could also be an email address.

gnassar’s picture

But that's precisely my point: the feature request here is for a *user* whitelist. So it would have no meaning for anonymous users.

And anonymous comments don't have to require email addresses, so that's a piece of functionality for a very specific (and unusual) use case.

AlexisWilke’s picture

That's right. The question was about users so I would imagine those actually log in his website. So the permissions is enough in this case. 8-)

mandclu’s picture

Yes, it is possible to manage the original issue using the "bypass filters" permission.

I was hoping for a simpler way to handle it, given that under standard usage someone needs "administer permissions" in order to assign roles. At that point they can give themselves whatever permissions they want.

I was able to use Role Delegation to allow admins and moderators to assign a special single-permission role to users who have been active enough in the community to be trusted not to post spam.

It does seem like a lot of work to mitigate an overly aggressive spam configuration. I know I have some work to do tweaking the setup, and I'll open a separate support request about that.

Spam module should have some kind of built-in way for admins and moderators (not all of whom should have broad permissions themselves) to designate certain users as less of a concern for spam.