I have been running Drupal since about 2003, thanks to Boris. (Take that either direction you want BMann... ;)) And now that is is starting to "get popular and take over the world" - in quotes because I am sure Boris has said this at some point in the last few months - I am getting slammed by spambots.
I have about 13000 spam posts on my personal blog (it Googles quite highly) and less on this site. I used to use the Spam module when I was running Drupal 4.x but when I moved to 5.x that module was not ready for prime time so I skipped the installation.
Whoops.
Now, I have remediated this fact by putting the more capable (hopefully) Akismet spam module in place. Sure, it required me to get a WordPress.com user account (took all of 30 seconds - good work Lloyd & Co.) to get an API key to use this module but when I had the thing up for a grand total of a minute and the spam blocked count was already at 1, I know I had a winner.
If you run Drupal - use a spam guard of some sort. Or enjoy pressing Delete 260 times, as I will when I finally get around to removing the backlog. I guess I should file a feature request "Ability to purge an entire queue"...
I'm running Drupal 5 too and
Mon 06/11/07 by gfox@muddylaces.caI'm running Drupal 5 too and have been hit with spam. My solution was the spam module. I guess it was ready when I moved.
I now get notifications when something looks spammy, and they are very easy to mass delete if you stay on top of them.
I share your pain...
Fri 06/08/07 by scott@www.rogue...I had the same issue and then when I went to Drupal 5 I decided to turn anonymous posting back on and give the Captcha module a try. Well for a while it was working great but I'm just now starting to see "Test Comment Post" on my site. Someone is trying to tweak an automated spam script and defeating the Captcha (it was just a matter of time I guess). Part of the problem is the Captcha I'm using is the "Answer the Mathematical question to post" but the problem is a bit of analysis of the Captcha someone can create simple artificial intelligence to infer the question and easily calculate the answer. This is made easier too since the Captcha is always located in the same location in the HTML (if it was output in different locations and its identity was masked it would make automated scripts much harder to write). But I digress... Bottom line: Captcha is failing and I sense a vast increase of spam coming to my site in the future.
I think I'll give the Akismet Spam Module a try too. It sounds promising, I like the idea of a distributed learning algorithm approach. I'm curious about false-positives and false-negatives though. Keep me posted on your own findings.
Hey Boris, what does Bryght do for all of it's community sites?
Hacky deletion solution
Sat 06/09/07 by EvanI edited the akismet_admin.inc and added a new menu entry of 1000. I had tried 5000 but Drupal ran out of memory!
Worked well, if slowly. 26 clicks instead of 260. I still would like to have a "purge all" option but I don't think I will ever get this far behind again.
Incidently, Akismet has blocked 20 spam posts in the last 24 hours!