Fixed Comments (again, again)

Multiple readers have reported problems in leaving comments on posts. I have now fixed that issue, and all comments should go through OK. Many apologies for any frustration caused and please  email me if you have any problems in future. I very much appreciate getting comments and it drives me nuts to hear that people tried to leave them and couldn’t.

This isn’t the first time this issue has cropped up. It’s caused by a really, really stupid security module that fancies itself as a censor. Some of its rules block comments featuring ‘naughty’ words like femdom, porn or sex. Obviously on a blog like this one, that presents a problem. I want the security features it offers, but not its morality policing. Anytime they do an upgrade I have to dig back into the guts of it to figure out what I need to keep and what I need to pull out.

For any bloggers interested in the technical details I’ve put them at the end of the post. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a picture of Mistress Evilyne about to do to a submissive what I’d like to do to whoever thought of adding porn filtering rules to a low level security module.

For anyone interesting, the module in question is called ModSecurity. If you login to WHM and then go to the ModSecurity Tools panel, you can see what rules are triggering. So if you post a ‘bad’ comment you’ll see what rule is triggering that you need to remove. Then go to the ‘Rules List’ and hit ‘Edit Rules’. That’ll give you an xml type file to edit. You need to add a section that blocks the specific rules you want to kill. For example, what I just added is shown below. That removes the specific problem rules  from Atomicorp for the wordpress comments page.

<LocationMatch /wp-comments-post.php>
SecRuleRemoveById 300065
SecRuleRemoveById 300074
</LocationMatch>