Isn’t there something that can be done about this? Invariably, now, if I try to submit a bug report or comment to trac, it hits me with a captcha! Last time the captcha was actually unreadable – twice! I’m going to cease bothering to submit stuff if this continues!
Have you considered opening a bugreport about it?
runs hides
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Grrr…rrrrrrr…! Where’s my whacker…?
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Don’t do that, Pete, we’d miss you! 
I really thought there was a filter bypass/user-level override of the spam filter, but it appears not… There is a spam monitoring console from which I can force-classify things as “spam” or “ham”, but it only goes back 150 items, and we’ve had 150 spam items over the past four hours … so I can’t see whatever you tried to post.
So instead I’ve just added you as a “spam monitor” and “spam trainer” – I think you’re trusted enough around here 
You should see an “Admin” button in your navigation bar now, and from there you should be able to see things that the spam filter classified, and force it to “delete as ham” to tell it that “that item was really not spam.”
Use your new powers wisely…
So nice to feel wanted! 
Thanks for giving me the power. I’ll see if I can fix things up.
I’m surprised there’s so much spam. Is much of it genuine spamming, or just stuff like mine that it’s antsy about? I could point you to my posts if it would help?
The filter has been quite badly trained. It is a bayesian filter and not the only thing we use to decide wether an user is spam or not. However, bayesian filters work better when about half the training entries are spam, and half are “ham” (ie. “not spam”). Our filter was trained with about 99% spam, so it has trouble detecting ham, now. Maybe we should consider resetting it and properly training it.
There are other settings we can tweak (+points for authenticated users, data from akismet and/or other 3rd party spam detection websites which may have better decisions than Trac, etc). However, we can only tweak this if people report their problems immediately and we can investigate while the entries are still in the spam log (then we can see the scoring for each of the filtering methods, and adjust the way we account for them to produce a better decision for the next time). If we can’t review this log, there is not much we can do (except randomly tweaking settings in the hope that it will work better).
Thanks for the details. I was actually wondering if I was getting “bad points” somehow, once it thought something I submitted was spam. (It always shows my user number.) I’d have thought that solving a captcha would reverse that, though.
I tried to submit a bug but every captcha I solved it threw me another captcha. Some were unreadable to me. There was no way I could submit the bug.
I tried to reply to another bug that I submitted in 2014 but trac thought I was spamming. Solving many captchas did not allow me to submit, so I gave up. Some of the captchas I could not read.
Just a pointer… you can always edit your own posts. (The ‘pencil’ icon to the left of the ‘Reply’ button.)
Thanks, I never saw that pencil icon
It looks like even though trac kept making me solve another captcha my reply to the bug still got submitted.