Ryan Snyder

Raise your hand if you don't like comment spam. I see everyone has their hands up. We've all dealt with it, either as a site visitor or as a blog owner, and it's simply no fun. I haven't had this blog up long, maybe 6 weeks in all, yet somehow I've already made it into the blackjack spambot. Yes, each of the last 263 comments have all had something to do with blackjack. Who knew the card game was so popular? I sure didn't.

I'm using Drupal 5.2 as the CMS here. I have certain likes and dislikes about Drupal, but all in all it is a pretty solid product, and certainly provides an ample amount of tools for me to implement quickly and for the most part efficiently. Spam is one of the pieces I haven't had to deal with a whole lot from an admin perspective, so I found myself scrambling to implement a spam deterrent as quickly as possible.

Captcha or one of its many variants was the logical first choice to go with. The problem with Captcha though is that I find it to be somewhat of a deterrent even for humans to use. I often find myself asking, "Is that an n or an r?" I may eventually add reCaptcha to the site, but for the time being I went with the Drupal spam module. It took 5 minutes to download, install and configure, and blocks everything that sounds fishy. I went with the default settings, added one filter for the word "blackjack" and overall am very impressed. Here is a quick look at the log: