ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

I recently suffered from Drupal Comment Spam too – however I already had the Spam module and the Captcha module installed – but the spammer(s) were persistant.

I ended up using a “phonebook to kill a wasp” approach by simply blocking that ISP’s subnet. I wrote it up on my blog; From Russia Without Love.

Registration does not help in itself, automated registration bots are also visiting Drupal sites, and after registered, post comments. So some kind of registration blocker (eg. a captcha) is still needed.

Yes, that’s an annoying bug of captcha module. Most of the time (almost certain when preview comment.) I had to enter the question twice to get it pass…

Akismet is a great tool: (www.akismet.com) Mi Wordpress blogs have got akismet plugin that block all the spam.

I don’t try spam or captcha module, but I think akismet is the better option for blogs now.

Thanks for your suggestions :)

Don’t forget about access rules. Mass blocking of large amounts of domains (e.g. *.biz, *.ru) is quite effective.

I force user signup and I still get spam. Also, there is “user profile spam” even if you don’t allow comments — people sign up with profile names or fields that have spam URLs in them.

Access rules aren’t perfect, but you can block emails with “nasty” domain names. It should probably be extended to be the blocking mechanism for anonymous comments, too.

When you say captcha you mean the math question, right, not the image captcha (aka Textimage)?

If found that the math question was solved by many spammers lately and it is not working for me. The main issue here is mono-culture. If many sites use the same simple question then it is worth the spammer’s time to solve it.

Have a look at a new module called Captcha Riddler, I think it is going the right direction: http://drupal.org/project/riddler

Also, the Captcha module went through some cleanup recently, I think it is improving.

Akismet does not work for me at all. Yes, it does stop most spam, but it still notifies me and I still have to clear the queue (being careful not to delete any good comments). Lots of boring work.

An finally, the trackback module. It seems broken to me. Even though it is configured to moderate all trackbacks, it still publishes them right away. Did anyone else experience the same?

Not sure if there is a solution to trackback spam in general, since there is no human intervention when a trackback is submitted.

Marius

I’m using Akismet and comment mail, currently. I’d love to add a math captcha back into the mix, but that module has been pretty broken for awhile now (note: I’m simply stating the reason I don’t use it, not complaining about its current state. My own contrib modules haven’t been getting as much love as they should get lately either, I know what it’s like).

Akismet has been fantastic.

I’ve not had any comment spam posted to my Drupal 5.1 site yet, though I’ve had numerous attempts at automatic registration and direct comment access. Since I have a business site, I require registration for some features, such as comments. I’m using these modules:

Comment Mail Registration Code Spam Troll

I created a block to used with Registration Code that contains an image with the current registration code and instructions on where to enter the code. I decided to do this as an image to prevent the code from being spidered.

So far it’s been working great. I had a couple of dozen automatic registration attempts in the past two days and all have failed.