Drupal Spam

Fighting Spam in Drupal with Mollom and Hashcash

Submitted by aaron on Wed, 2009-07-22 18:48

I hate spam. Of course, I imagine the overworked, underpaid dupes in Pakistan dishing it out at 5¢ per hundred comments don't particularly like it much either. It's just their job.

So anyway, about a year ago, the spam on this site was getting a bit out of control. Fortunately, Mollom had just whipped out their new, free spam-blocking service about the same time, so I gladly installed it. As you can see in the graph below (the orange being 'Spam attempts blocked'), this has been a fantastic boon for the site, with over 700,000 spam attempts blocked in the past year.

Mollom blocks spam (2008-2009)

Looking at that graph, you can see the spam attempts really dropped off sometime in April or May. I really don't know why; if anything, the traffic to this site has steadily increased over the year. I suspect that whatever methods spammers were using were not paying off as well, perhaps in part due to the diligence of the great folks over at Mollom?

However, read on to see how it's been fairing lately...

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The Society for Venturism has chosen me as the recipient of its charity for this year, to hopefully offer me cryonic preservation when the time comes. And this month, Longecity, an excellent forum for the discussion of issues related to extending the lifespan of humans, has offered up a matching grant of up to a thousand dollars to help out! So help out! Please.