Drupal for DummiesEvil Spambots Stopped! Thanks, Mollom
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.
- Lynn Beighley's blog
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Great
Thanks for the recommendation, Lynn. It took a few minutes to set up the mollom account, activate the site and set it up but so far its been a record breaking 5 hours since the last spam. Very good module/service. And free for my small site.
capcha
So, how do the spammers get past the Capcha?
(Great book by the way.)
After playing around for
After playing around for another day - I find I can disable the validation by User Role - so for admin and Editors - I can suppress the Mollom check. Its a little oversensitive - since the articles I'm writing today are about spam, scams, credit card theft etc.
But this solves my complaint in the previous comment
http://www.maclean-design.com/
http://imvutility.com/
Mollom
I had one Drupal site sitting for 6 months with not much activity, a few people joined that looked like spam, but they never verified their email and never posted. I started to get into updating the site again and within a couple of days started getting a flock of new users with exactly the same kind of weird looking gmail addresses. After several spam comments I enabled user approval by admin and blocked all the fake addresses - but i could see the frequency was increasing and wasting my time.
I was lucky enough to find Mollom very quickly and enable it, and since then - all the spam signups are getting rejected
I suspect that there are some bots out there monitoring Drupal sites for activity and then triggering auto bot signups.
The only problem so far, is that Mollom thinks a lot of my posts are spam and forces a capcha.
http://www.maclean-design.com/
http://imvutility.com/