Drupal 7 Anti Spam

There are loads of options for preventing spam on Drupal 7. Just search the web. I’m looking at four alternatives that range in complexity and cost. Best start with the simplest and move up in complexity as required.

Spamicide

Spamicide

Provides a simple honeypot i.e. a field hidden from people via CSS, that will signal spam if filled. This is a nice accessible approach - even if the field is made visible by diabling CSS, then a text description will inform the visitor that they shouldn’t complete it.

It is of course a very basic mechanism, but it may just be enough. Worth a try first.

Note: This module didn’t work for me with custom forms i.e. I couldn’t add the spam control to custom forms - it was a bit of a mess actually. I tried version 7.x-1.1 and 7.x-1.x-dev. The problem was on the bug tracker, so hopefully it’ll be fixed.

Botcha

Botcha

Provides a number of simple mechanisms to detect and block spam, such as looking at the number of form submissions and their timing, honeypots (fields hidden from people) and validation.

Seems like a good one to try if the basic approach of Spamicide doesn’t work (which it didn’t - see above).

If Botcha is protecting a form you’ll see a botcha field has been added to the HTML (view source of the page). Note that Botcha won’t protect forms if you’re logged in.

Note: One problem with the 7.x-3.3 version I tested is that once you’ve added BOTCHA protection to a form you can’t remove it, only disable it. Annoying if you make a typo.

Text CAPTCHA

Text CAPTCHA

Simple question / answer sets, provided by the Text CAPTCHA web service, which is currently free and unrestricted. The module caches the Q&A sets in case the web service is unavailable. I like the simplicity of the approach.

Mollum

Mollum

Spam detection by the Mollum web service. I chose this instead of Akismet because it can be tried for free on commercial sites.

The service will use various mechanisms to detect spam. If it’s sure whether spam or not then it’ll either block it or let it through. If unsure then it’ll present the user with a captcha. This shouldn’t happen too often.

Captchas are not accessible and they are pretty much cracked by spammers now anyway, but Mollum said it would move on to other mechanisms when required.

One problem is what happens if Mollum service is unavailable. You can choose to block all form submissions or accept all. I’d set the latter and try it out to see whether the service is reliable.

Last modified: 07/02/2014 Tags: ,

This website is a personal resource. Nothing here is guaranteed correct or complete, so use at your own risk and try not to delete the Internet. -Stephan

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