Wander over to DrupalEasy.com and check out Mike Anello's interview with me about Drupal for Dummies.

Leave a comment and you could win a free copy of the book!

It's been about a week since this site was attacked by the spambots. I was getting 3 or 4 new user accounts per hour, and this rate began increasing. While I could tell that they were bogus accounts by looking at their email addresses, it was an annoyance to get so many notifications. Also, I really want visitors to this site to have an easy time getting an account, and not have to wait until I have time to approve their registrations.

So I tried a few things, but in the end I installed the Mollom module. It takes a few steps to get signed up and register it, but the instructions are easy to follow. And it's well worth it! Take a look at the graph Mollom generated for me showing the spam it caught. Click on the image to see it full size. But even looking at the thumbnail, you can tell Mollom has been great. The orange color represents spam user accounts that have been prevented.

I've got this site set up to require users to give a valid email address to request a new account. This being the case, I have the opportunity to see those email addresses.
The spammer who has been causing me annoyance today has emails that look like this:

bl.a.z.e.c.a.s.e.y.ol.omon @gmail.com
a.le.x.iva.n.o.vidr.ug @gmail.com
s.e.mautk.in.g.v.a.nfu @gmail.com

You get the idea. So when I see an email like that, I don't grant account access.

I've also banned access to people trying to set up accounts from specific domains. These include:

free-lesbian-pic.in
stanleykitchens-zp.in
bfkrnln.org
clothesbestsearch.info
avgustinotarapul.com
baggot.net

Well, it was too good to last. Up until recently, this site hadn't been visited by many spammers. Requiring users to register to post anything helped with that, but certain persistent ne'er-do-wells have spoiled things. So what do I do about the spam problem?

I considered taking the step of approving all new users manually, but I didn't want people to have to wait hours or potentially longer for me to approve them. Instead, I've chosen to install a new module (the very useful user notification module: http://drupal.org/project/user_register_notify) that sends me an email when a new user signs up. This way I can:

1. Check the email they've provided. Sometimes that will tell you if a user is a spammer. Certain domains are almost always spammers.

2. Check the forums. Spammers don't waste time posting spam. They aren't likely to sign up for an account and come back hours later to post garbage. So I wait a few minutes and take a look.

When I do catch a spammer, I block his account. This way, if they still want to spam, they have to go to the trouble of signing up for an entirely new account, with a new, valid email address.