30 Spam Comments in 2 mins Blocked by Mollom


published by thomas on Thu, 07/22/2010 - 20:37

I routinly go through the Drupal logs here on Nutshell, mainly checking for any potential error messages for Drupal 7. Today when I had a look I noticed a big spike in the Mollom statistics. Yesterday there where 30 atempts to comment spam. Naturally I had to look further into it since I am just running small blog and that single spike doubled the total number of spam atempts since I enabled the Mollom module a month and a half ago.

I quickly discovered they all came from the same IP number and they where all submitted within a 2 minute period. Clearly they must have been posted by a script targeting unprotected Drupal based websites.

My website is just my personal blog with very little traffic, so far. This experience tells me that spammers doesn't care about the size, they only care about finding websites that are not properly protected.

Protect Your Drupal Website with Mollom!

Thanksfully protecting your Drupal website from this is easy and will only take a few minutes to do. Compare that to all the time you otherwise have to spend, wasting, removing spam comments otherwise.

Free Option - Even better, for a small website like mine it will cost you nothings since Mollom has a free subscription option for small websites.

Simply do the following:

  1. Go to the Mollom website and create a user account.
  2. Download and enable the Mollom module.
  3. Configure it with your API keys from your Mollom account.
  4. Enable it for the forms on you website.

That's it! Now your website is protected and you don't have to waste any more time deleting spam.

You can find a more detailed instalation guide on the Mollom website.

If you don't protect your website you only risk losing visitors that get tired of all the spam comment, as well as being ranked lower by search engines when they discover that it is full of spam!

Thank you Mollom for keeping my website protected.

Tags: 
Drupal
Mollom

Comments

#

Adrián (not verified)

Fri, 07/23/2010 - 02:20

Re: 30 Spam Comments in 2 mins Blocked by Mollom

But in addition to your program against comment spam, you should help your program, remember that you can use from your Hosting account, blocking IPs.

You can also use blocking traffic by reference. For explample, In Hostgator we use in Apache.
# Block traffic from multiple referrers.

Regards.

#

thomas

Fri, 07/23/2010 - 12:36

Re: 30 Spam Comments in 2 mins Blocked by Mollom

Hi Adrían,

That is an option yes, but it also sort of contradict the purpose of using a service like Mollom that handles that automatically for you. The main reason for using it is that it will minimise your manual administration of spam, both removing as well as blocking. Mollom has built in features to block users that does a good job.

Another problem with banning IP is that you first must make sure it is a static IP number. In my case the IP number belonged to a ADSL pool. Thus it is very likely that the spammer only need to restart their ADSL router to get a new IP number and not be affected by the block any more.

/thomas