AllowList Assistance

[howeyg (Howey)]

Good Day, I have recently incorporated the AllowList along with an IVR to thwart robocallers.
Works really well, and wish to thank the Developers involved. What I would like is a way to add
dialed numbers to the AllowList automatically. I have seen mention on the Forum this is possible, but searching I have found no methodology to accomplish this goal. Any insight would be appreciated!

[lgaetz (Lorne Gaetz)]

@howeyg

[I] wish to thank the Developers involved

That would be @mitchmitchell, send him some happy thoughts.

@howeyg

What I would like is a way to add
dialed numbers to the AllowList automatically

FreePBX AllowList Caller Module -- to block all but a list of allowed callers

If you want to use Dynamic Routes to create a destination that automatically adds the caller’s CID number to the Allow List (i.e. after caller has successfully navigated an IVR or otherwise proved themselves not to be a robocall) you can do so using this expression: ${SET(DB(allowlist/${CALLERID(number)})=Auto-${CALLERID(name)})} [image] This expression will not return anything useful, so you won’t be able to branch the call with this, just write it and move along to whatever the default des…

[howeyg (Howey)]

I see that will work for incoming calls, so it will also add numbers dialed from an internal extension to be added to the AllowList?

[lgaetz (Lorne Gaetz)]

That’s an allowlist feature, check the outbound route for that option.

[howeyg (Howey)]

So obvious if you know where it is!
Thank You very much.

[howeyg (Howey)]

Issue with adding number to the allow list via the outbound route rule. I can dial 9 digit number to call externally, and this entry is added in the AllowList. However, the Allowlist ignores these entries unless I manually place a 1 in front of the number. So it appears the allow list is looking for the country code as well? (10 Digits).

[howeyg (Howey)]

Sorry, should not post when tired, 11 digits.
Thanks!

[lgaetz (Lorne Gaetz)]

I recall this being discussed, and there is no good fix to this. Allowlist works with an exact digit match with incoming CID. If you must dial out with 11 digits and incoming CID only has 10 (or vice versa), then it may be that auto-adding dialed numbers is not going to work for you.

[howeyg (Howey)]

Thank You, not a huge problem. I elected to stop collecting AllowList data from the Outbound Route. Dynamic Routes is successfully adding information from callers that pass the IVR DMTF test. What few I may need to add manually is insignificant compared to the benefits reaped! Robocalls down to zero from 20 plus a day!

Thank Everyone for the Development of FreePBX. It does a really great job!

[mitchmitchell]

I’ve been searching for a good regex or other type of pattern matching system I could use in the allowlist. Originally I had the list only looking at the last 10 digits of the number but that never worked correctly so I removed the truncation.

[mitchmitchell]

Let me look into creating a user specified setting to strip off leading digits before storing an outbound number in the allow list.

[lgaetz (Lorne Gaetz)]

Superfecta has methods to apply an asterisk dial pattern regex to number strings. IIRC it’s pretty complete, just missing the rarely used ! character.

[mitchmitchell]

Ill look at that, thats a good feature to enable/disable on a per route basis.

I also found that the autoadd features still uses the 10 digit limit. I’m going to change that to be user definable on a per-route basis.

Looking at it from a UI perspective, any thoughts on whether it is better to allow specifying the number of leading digits to remove or the number of digits to store?

e.g for a specific route let the user specify ‘remove first 2 digits’ vs allowing them to say ‘store only trailing 10 digits’

[mitchmitchell]

I’m thinking something like this would be pretty easy to implement.

[lgaetz (Lorne Gaetz)]

We’re spoiled here in NANP land, number format and length is very consistent, but not so elsewhere. One of those two rules should work for many cases, maybe even most.

[mitchmitchell]

I have implemented this in my repository.

@howeyg if you want to try the test version, download it here:
https://git.freepbx.org/scm/~mitchmitchell/allowlist.git

If you get a chance to try it out, let me know what you think!

The numbers to trim and numbers to store just feed directly into a php substr function as offset and length arguments so negative numbers will also work per the php.net description: PHP: substr - Manual

[howeyg (Howey)]

The FreePBX I administer is also a production system for a small non-profit.
Are there any contra-indications for giving this a test drive?

While I am here let me Thank You for the AllowList Module.
Combined with my DTMF IVR this is a superb method by which to thwart robocalls!

[mitchmitchell]

make sure you are on the latest edge version of allowlist and backup your system and also export your allowlist before downloading the test version.

If you decide to revert to the released version you will have to turn off and turn back on allowlist autoadding for each outbound route you use it on. The structure of the data stored for autoadd has changed though I think it is backward compatible its better to place it safe. Turning autoadd off and applying changes will delete the new format and then when you turn to back on after reverting the allowlist module will reset the datastructure to the old format.

Other than that, it “should” be fine but I’m still testing it myself so there is certainly no guarantee of stability…