Nslookup text in post causes a 403?

[Mr E]

Trying to provide some pointers in the computers forum

Specifically, included the text nslookup <site>
Unable to post or preview, got a 403 forbidden.

I know the back end is a bit, erm, crude but really?

[randlemarcus]

 nslookup www.microsoft.com 

Use the code tags, it ignores potentially dubious stuff then.

[Ben Lowden]

Copying this over from another thread – but essentially what you're posting is deemed as malicious. Appreciate you're trying to be helpful though!

afrere_ph said:

As you've gathered these types of issues do pop up rarely for certain inputs as the firewall we run (to keep the forums secure) can sometimes falsely interpret safe text as malicious. We do plan at some point to make this experience better, but for now it is a known limitation for a small percentage of posts.

That said, you can use the Preview function to gradually isolate the problematic bit in the block of text - e.g. for the text block, start with just the first paragraph and try Preview, if you see 403 you know the bad part exists within there and can go back and further filter it down.

It is a fiddly process, but given the firewall is a managed service and uses an industry standard ruleset to catch security risks, there isn't much else that can be done at the moment (without significant dev effort!).

Alternatively, feel free to post a screenshot of the text that's being blocked, or email [e-mail] and we may be able to shed some light.

Cheers!

[TonyRPH]

I've had similar issue too, with posting bash scripts, php code etc.

It's a bit of a sledgehammer approach to text filtering.

[Mr E]

Cheers for the cross post from elsewhere

TonyRPH said:

It's a bit of a sledgehammer approach to text filtering.

It is
I guess it’s a “do you expend effort to improve the experience for 0.001% of forum posts”
Clearly not.