Spam vs discard

[tsgeric]

Hi, can someone help me understand how the different statuses of spam and discarded are related, and what the relationship is between stories and authors in this regard?

For stories, I see that I have the option to delete discarded stories from the database. So, is it fair to say that identifying a story as spam (either manually or automatically) is a more like a temporary status so I can review it if I want, and then If I wanted to get rid of the story I would move it to spam and then discard it?

How is it that some stories I see in the discarded pile, I didn't put them there myself. Is that because an anti-spam module put it there? Wouldn't an anti-spam module put those stories into the spam category?

If a story is marked as spam, I understand that the user account is invalidated, and all that user's stories are comments are moved into spam. If one story is un-spammed, and set to published again, does that reset the rest of the author's stories? Does that "resurrect" the user?

I noticed that I can discard and delete stories, but not users. Spam users can get re-enabled, but not deleted. So that list will just grow over time?

Thanks,
Eric

[Yankidank]

Spam/Killspam is permanent. If you mark a story as spam from the admin panel, that will "killspam" the user who contributed that content (story or comment). Once you have killspammed a user all of their stories and comments are marked as spam. Spam content is kept in the database for the purposes of keeping track of bad users and their content. This way they won't be able to try submitting bad content again, since Pligg only allows you to submit a URL once.

Killspamming a user is a really serious action, so you should be very careful when marking stories and comments as spam. There is no simple undo option to reverse the actions that the killspam takes.

Discard is temporary, but can be permanent. Marking a story as discarded is like moving a file to your computer's recycle bin. You've marked it for deletion, but you haven't emptied the trash yet. When you run the link to "Delete discarded stories from database" you are permanently deleting all stories marked as discarded from your database. Discarding is a good way to remove content that is innocently bad (not spam, but not worth publishing).

Stories that haven't been completed (user failed to finish submitting) are marked as discarded. Spammers will often end up failing to submit a story due to Anti-spam features, which is why you may sometimes see a lot of discarded stories piling up in your database.

Moderated is temporary status. This is a story status that only modules use. For example, the Akismet module will mark a story as "moderated" until you have a chance to review the items. These stories will still show up in the news management area of the admin panel, with no status set (no radio buttons activated).

[foofoo]

yankidank: Killspamming a user is a really serious action, so you should be very careful when marking stories and comments as spam. There is no simple undo option to reverse the actions that the killspam takes.

UPDATE pligg_links SET link_status = replace(link_status,"spam","published")

im glad i figured this out today what a coincedence this was asked yesterday.

[tsgeric]

if you are managing your stories, it seems to me that you can move stories in the spam category back to the published category.

So does that un-killspam the user and all his stories?

[Yankidank]

yankidank: Killspamming a user is a really serious action, so you should be very careful when marking stories and comments as spam. There is no simple undo option to reverse the actions that the killspam takes.

UPDATE pligg_links SET link_status = replace(link_status,"spam","published")

That may change stories that were accidentally marked as spam as published, but it will also publish any spam stories that you have in your database so I would advise against that. You would probably want to include the user ID that you accidentally killspammed so that it will only recover their stories. You would also want to re-enabled the account so that they are no longer marked as a spammer.

Below is my guess at what query you could run to undo all of this. I haven't tested it, and I'm not very good at queries off the top of my head so this could probably use some testing and improvement. You will need to know the killspammed user ID (number) for the first part and username for the second. Place the user ID after the link_author part (set to 1 in the example).

UPDATE pligg_links 
SET link_status='queued' 
WHERE link_author='1' AND link_status='spam'

UPDATE pligg_users
SET user_enabled='1' AND user_level='normal' 
WHERE user_login='username'

If you choose to try the code above out, please backup your database first so that you won't hate me if something goes terribly wrong.