"Service unavailable" error

Submitted by Locutus on Fri, 11/02/2012 - 13:24

I'm getting an error message "Service unavailable", after about 40 seconds delay, when trying to make a forum post.

Status: 
Active

Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Fri, 11/02/2012 - 13:36

Howdy -- we have a nifty new anti-spam plugin that's been blocking a lot of the spam that ends up in the forums.

One of it's features is that, when it detects spam, that particular user isn't allowed to post anything else unless the spam flag is removed.

Two of the downsides of that are --

  1. It sometimes generates false positives

  2. When it's blocking posts, it has an irritatingly obscure error message :-)

It looks like your last forum post was marked as spam... which I was notified about, and attempted to correct some hours ago. But I pressed the wrong button :-)

It should be all set now though... give that a shot and let us know if that does the trick!

Submitted by Locutus on Fri, 11/02/2012 - 13:57

Yeah, forum post worked now.

I'm wondering for what criteria my post was marked as spam?

Also, my suggestion would be to be careful with such anti-spam measures. While we all agree that spam is a major nuisance, false positives are even more so, at least if they lead to situations like this.

For example, when I tried to make the forum post that triggered this issue here, I was lucky enough to quickly copy+paste my text away before I received the "Service unavailable". And that was only because I was painfully reminded of that period about a year ago, when your servers had problems and kept throwing errors when making posts.

Had I not done so, my text would have been lost, because when clicking "Back" in that situation, the text input field is empty and my entered text is gone. And, in all honesty, I'd probably not have typed it all in again, because my eagerness to help people here ends when I have to type stuff multiple times, to debug your anti-spam measures. ;)

So, at the very least, you should white-list existing users who have proven not to be spammers.

Submitted by Locutus on Sat, 11/03/2012 - 04:57

Considering the three new spam forum threads that arrived three hours ago, it would seem your nifty new anti-spam plugin isn't as efficient as you might have hoped for? ;)

Submitted by dly on Fri, 07/12/2013 - 19:26

I apparently have the same exact issue. My account is screwed up too. I get insanely long timeouts followed by obnoxious "Service unavailable" errors. Please install better spam filters with fewer false positives.

The last thing I did post was a support request or forum post. I don't think I marked it as private, but apparently it was, which was annoying, because I wanted it to be public. I forget the exact url, but you can probably search based on my user name to find it.

Maybe my last post messed up this post. I don't know.

To help you find my wrongly marked as spam posts. I copied and pasted the subject and body below.

Subject: Virtualmin backup failed with lockfile error: Failed to lock file /home/someuser/.backup

Body:

Our housing provider's network went down causing a scheduled backup to fail. Weirdly, it was still running two days later, so I killed it. But it somehow kept an annoying lockfile around.

A manual backup ended with the error:

Backup failed : Failed to lock file /home/someuser/.backup after 5 minutes. Last error was :

How should I fix this lock file? Should I just delete the .backup directory?

Thanks, Dave.

Submitted by drguild on Mon, 07/07/2014 - 01:39

I'm getting this also my last post action was a edit to the first post in a thread I made which was there for a couple weeks with just a notice to look at the last post and the thread was sent to moderation.

Probably because I edited what is considered a old post my first post in a thread of mine I started a week or two later with a update so new readers could know without scrolling through the thread.

Submitted by andreychek on Mon, 07/07/2014 - 09:34

That issue occurs whenever Drupal thinks what you posted is spam.

Your post should be corrected now -- but if you find that you still can't post new comments in the Forum, open up a new Support request so that we can look into it. This one is a bit old, it'd be better to start with a new one... thanks!