The Changelog

I run Drupal for this site, as well as some others hosted here. My #1 complaint about it is that the spam solutions in Drupal are ineffective and poorly-designed. The situation seems to have actually gotten a bit worse in the most recent versions of Drupal. Here are my complaints:

• No working support for captchas. (I had lots of problems with captcha.module)


• Spam filter is not very effective, despite being properly trained on huge volumes of spam. I get dozens, if not hundreds, of uncaught spam comments per day.


• The "mark as spam" button has no effect on some very large spams.


• There is no feedback to users whose comments have been marked as spam, indicating to them that the comment will be manually approved.


• There is no auto-expiry of spam comments; they sit in the database forever unless manual action is taken.


• Deleting spam comments -- which seems to be the way that people are encouraged to use the spam module -- requires: checking one checkbox per message, then selecting "delete", and repeating this for each page of the spam comment listings (it only puts a few dozen per page; I get about 15 pages worth in a slow day.) Even with some Mozilla toolbar help, this is a slow and cumbersome process.


• No "auto-delete" feature for spams referencing certain URLs.


• Poor recognition of &-sequences in HTML


• Nobody really maintains the spam filter


• Does nothing at all to stop trackback spam

So, my question is: what blogging software has good anti-spam capabilities?

Back when I used WordPress, I used the Captcha module for it, which worked well. (Its normal anti-spam capabilities didn't.) Drupal doesn't have a working Captcha module, and everything else is hugely labor-intensive.

Is there something better out there for Drupal anywhere?

I often get the impression that the authors of the spam module in Drupal get less than a dozen spams per day on their blogs. It simply doesn't scale to places that get hundreds of spams per day.

(Update: Drupal also isn't very responsive at addressing bugs...)