Topic on Project:Support desk

I've been getting some complaints from the users of my site about error messages regarding account creation. Specifically, when trying to create an account, they get "Forbidden. Please submit form again. " or a variant that says "You submitted too quickly." I tested this out myself and it's been fairly inconsistent. Sometimes, I'm able to create an account after one try, but other times I can't at all after five or more tries.

After doing some digging, I found that temporarily disabling CleanTalk (from the Antispam plugin) allows one to register their account with no further hindrances. I don't quite understand why CleanTalk has to do it with it though because to my knowledge, a different error message regarding blacklisting appears if a spambot tries to register. However, I am hesitant to turn CleanTalk off in the long term because it actually does its job really well at blocking spam. It blocks about 300 - 400 attacks per week with only one or two misses every now and then.

I haven't been able to find any other topics regarding similar issues, so I was wondering what I could do to be able to fix this.

It sounds like CleanTalk is taking too long to update or erroring out. What do the logs of your site say when there is a problem?

In the error log, I found the following message:

[15-Jan-2018 04:23:23 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined index: HTTP_REFERER in <my site's directory>/extensions/Antispam/Antispam.hooks.php on line 243

I'm currently using PHP version 5.6. Will it be necessary to upgrade?

This should be just a logical issue with the extension code, it's just a notice.

Then I suppose there's not too much I can do at this point? It doesn't look like there's been any updates since May of 2016.

For now though, I've just been having users request me to create their accounts for them by temporarily disabling CleanTalk, then reenabling it when needed.