Regexp security rules can become stale and stop working?

[Lanigiro]

This may be a recent regression, because I'm sure it used to work as expected before.

I had unwanted spammy search results with a name pattern like this:

Firstword-Secondword_Thirdword-fourthword.EXT

The first two words being constant. I tried all of the following security rules:

^(.*[Ff]irstword.[Ss]econdword.*)$
.*[Ff]irstword.[Ss]econdword.*
.*irstword..econdword.*

intended to cover likely capitalization and spacing-character variations, but none of them removed the pesky spam.

I'm pretty sure rules like the first one used to work reliably to match filenames like the example here.

The odd thing is, it still kinda sorta works but only part of the time:

1. I got one single spam of this sort a couple weeks ago, ignored it.

2. I got a whole rash of them about one week ago and added the first rule in the list above, only with the real first and second words of the spammy filenames. It promptly cleaned out the rash.

3. I restored a saved searches.dat with the single result from two weeks ago, and it was not filtered as it should have been.

4. I edited the security rule to the second version, without effect.

5. I edited the security rule to the third version, without effect.

6. I deleted the rule entirely and recreated it from scratch, with the first version again. And it started working again.

So it looks like rules can now go "stale" and stop working, with only deleting and recreating the rule fixing this. Editing it to something else that still matches the files you want to screen out doesn't un-stale it.

Notably, even if it does not re-screen for security rules when loading an existing searches.dat, at steps 4 and 5 it should have removed anything in open search tabs that matched the edited rule, and failed to do so. Step 6 worked and the only difference was that the rule was deleted and recreated instead of edited -- even though deleting and recreating a rule and editing it should have the same logical effect, only editing could be implemented to be a bit more efficient than deleting and recreating (one pass over all the existing search items to see what should be either filtered or de-filtered instead of two passes, one for de-filtering after the delete and one for re-filtering after the create).


P.S. Why do I now have to fill in the login form twice and answer an extra question on each login? It didn't used to do this, and I haven't changed anything here. It claimed "maximum login attempts" or something, but I'd never made any login attempt here that didn't succeed.