Keep getting 'Permission Denied' when try to post

[compused]

I keep getting 'permission denied' when I try to post my question. I am just entering this within paragraph tags to see whats happening.

[ambrus]

See Keep getting 'Permission Denied' when trying to reply.

Update: on second thought, as you've posted this in the afternoon, this need not be the same error.

[BrowserUk]

I saw this again this morning when attempting to reply to 949131 at 949141. I first attempted the 'create' a 9:09 and got the subject error.

I retried periodically after that until I finally succeeded at 9:57.

I made a note of it because it was

• a) outside the usual "DB busy" period.

  That hour or so when attempting to refresh your "Perl Monks User Search" fails with "XXX doesn't appear to have any posts"; which this week has been roughly 8:00 to 9:00 AM my time.

• b) unusually persistent.

  Usually when it happens, a couple of retries and you 'get through'; but this morning I must have tried half a dozen times or more over the hour before succeeding.

  Preview works during this time.

I don't think the problem ever went away, but it has seemed to be less prevalent for a while.

[jdporter]

To the admins:

I propose that we add a little bit of clarifying prose to the error message displayed in this situation.
One way to do it would be to make the following code change.
In Everything/HTML.pm, at line 1408 1876, insert a line like the following:

$HTMLVARS{reject_reason} = "Would you like some tough beans with that 
+spam?";

(I'd submit a patch for this, of course, but the patch system doesn't (currently?) support pmmodules.)

[tye]

When the anti-spam code transitioned to a white-list, the benefit to being coy about the details lost out to the benefits of being much clearer, IMHO. If you get "permission denied" due to using a non-white-listed link, then we should probably just tell you that.

I'm still somewhat reluctant about just spilling the beans about the easiest way around that problem (include the URL but not as a link). My reluctance is due to there being a lot of evidence of spammers being willing to post tons of stuff that doesn't actually work as spam (it doesn't get posted or doesn't get seen by a search engine or lacks any links that the search engine would honor to increase the spam site's "page rank"). But the relative speed with which our most recent persistent spammer gave up after the lack of effect became clear gave me some hope that spammers sometimes can tell when spamming is wasting their own time, not just everybody else's.

So, just being clear on that second point as well is probably the right choice.

But, even better, I think, would be to let people try to link to whatever and just prevent non-white-listed links authored by low-level members from being seen by search engines (and requiring non-search-engine visitors to POST a confirmation before they can follow one).

So contributions on either of those fronts will be welcomed by me.

As to getting "permission denied" due to DB server load, I think that problem will just go away when I finish adjusting a few indices. I've done some of that work but it isn't totally non-disruptive to the site so I haven't finished those changes yet.

(Update: Actually, trying to post a non-white-listed link perhaps should require going through a confirmation page that informs you that your link will not be seen by search engines and will be a bit of a pain for others to follow.)

[Anonymous Monk]

I recommend a non whitelist external link redirector

[Argel]

That seems fine. It's hard to imagine spammers reading an extra click-through.... ;)

[JavaFan]

Yeah, the error that's being linked to seems to have returned. I've experienced it back in November, around the same time BrowserUK posted about it, then it was fine, until it started happening again earlier this week. Encountered it half a dozen times or so this week, at different times.

[Khen1950fx]

I ran into the same problem last week. I cleared my browser's cache and cookies, closed the browser, restarted, and tried reposting. Worked.

[Anonymous Monk]

Stop linking to ornogirafy :)

See PERMISSION DENIED, you linked to perldoc.org, can't have that and secret perlmonks off site link whitelist