I’m trying to understand the bozo plugin and how it interacts with akismet. Looking through the code I can get a pretty good idea, but I’m worried I’ll miss some subtlety. Is there a decent English (as opposed to PHP) description of the goals/operation of either or both of these plugins anywhere?

One specific question: the bozo plugin’s “bb_bozon” function that flips the bozo bit for a user also takes a topic_id argument. It looks like the intention here is to have per-topic bozos. Akismet doesn’t seem to use this feature though. Am I reading this right, or is it for something else?

The context for this is that I want to allow a certain class of moderator-like users on our forum to mark posts as spam. When they do so the following will happen:

- the poster will be marked as bozo (using bb_bozon)

- all topics by that poster will get topic_status=2 (using bb_topic_delete)

- all remaining posts by that poster will get post_status=2 (using bb_post_delete)

- admin will get a notification

Admin will then have an option to reverse all of this. Sound reasonable?

Finally, if there is a plugin that already does something very similar, I’d love to hear about it. I have looked, but while there are some cool plugins out there they either do more than I need, or don’t have exactly the right functionality.

[chrishajerParticipant @chrishajer 2 years, 11 months ago]

I don’t think bozo and Akismet are hooked up at all.

The bozo feature was never particularly well implemented. I was trying to find a post by sambauers where he said as much.

I wrote this 3 years ago:

http://bbpress.org/forums/topic/fix-or-remove-bozo-function-before-it-kills-bbpress

Regarding a plugin, I’m not sure. Maybe someone else will post about it.

[GregParticipant @rebootnow 2 years, 11 months ago]

Thanks Chris. There is one place I see akismet hooked up to the bozo plugin. When the Akismet service comes back with a positive then it checks that the bozo plugin is installed and if so sets that user to a bozo.

if ( ‘true’ == $response[1] && function_exists( ‘bb_bozon’ ) ) {

bb_bozon( bb_get_current_user_info( ‘id’ ) );

}

I thought this was the ONLY current way (aside from other plugins) that a user automatically becomes a bozo. Is that correct?

I have used the bozo plugin to manually deal with spammers. As far as I know it just makes their posts visible to them but invisible to everyone else. Simple but effective.

I HAVE had problems when using akismet, so I thought the issues were more on the akisment side than the bozo side. Were the problems you mention in that post happening without akismet active?

[chrishajerParticipant @chrishajer 2 years, 11 months ago]

That post was three years ago, so I’m not sure to what I was actually referring.

I don’t use Akismet any more, so I’m not sure how it works with bozo. I know you can manually make someone a bozo, but never really got into how someone becomes a bozo or spammer automatically.

I am not sure what plugins are running here, but Akismet is for sure. When a post gets caught as spam, I can release it without having anything to do with bozo status, as far as I know. Maybe it’s automatic, or maybe the bozo plugin is not active here. But if a single post is caught as spam, I can just “unspam” it and it becomes visible again. I’ve never done anything with member status at all.

Hopefully someone with more experience moderating using both Akismet and bozo will come along.

[chrishajerParticipant @chrishajer 2 years, 11 months ago]

That is post id 6645. It’s probably closer to four years old at this point. That was also way before I knew what the heck I was doing.

[Ben L.Member @nightgunner5 2 years, 11 months ago]

Akismet automatically marks a newly registered user as a bozo if it gets a spam response to some of the user’s profile fields. Bozo status simply marks new posts from the user as spam. A post can be marked as spam by Akismet without the user being a bozo.