Drupal Doesn’t Stop Spam

I run Drupal for this site, as well as some others hosted here. My 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…)

5 thoughts on “Drupal Doesn’t Stop Spam

  1. http://www.ioerror.us/software/bad-behavior/ is popular among WordPress installations and is also available for GeekLog and MediaWiki. It’s apparently portable; perhaps you could adapt it for use with Drupal.

    1. bertboerland says:

      bad behaviour is available as well on drupal…

  2. Lukas says:

    http://s9y.org/ is a very nice blog-engine (php, mysql) all in all. It uses smarty templates (yay!), has captchas if you want, lets you select all messages on a page w/o having to click them all ;), and allows moderation/moderation of old entrys/whatever. Seems pretty flexible to me, and makes fun to use.

    Lukas

    1. jgoerzen says:

      Sweet. Thanks for the link. I had not heard of this one and will make sure to check it out.

  3. bryan@adminfoo.net says:

    Well I see you’ve found the updated spam.module which is good, but hang in there on the captcha.module as well. The real issue is that comment.module isn’t currently extensible, but word has it this will change in Drupal 4.7 which is under active and heavy development.

    Drupal rocks!

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