Reply To: Forum Moderation

Thank you for the explanation! If I see something that seems urgent I’ll use more words rather than provide a link. That should get our response posted a little faster.

A 100% anti-spam solution is hard to find. ReCaptcha will stop most bots, but can be annoying to real people unless you use the ‘skip’ feature for known users.

Then there is configuring Fail2Ban intrusion rules at the Apache level to deny access under certain conditions, such as too many hits within a certain time, or too many failed login attempts. The ban can be set to last a couple hours, a few days, or longer.

Another way to protect against known spammers is to use the appropriate module/plugin from StopForumSpam here: https://www.stopforumspam.com/mods

Incoming registrations and forum posts are analyzed in the StopForumSpam cloud in real-time and denied access if the posters IP or Email has a history of spamming. I use this on a Drupal site and it has been reliable.

I also use a Honeypot heuristics module developed for Drupal (Botcha) that is very reliable.

Between ReCaptcha, StopForumSpam, and Botcha… no spammers have gotten through on my Drupal site for almost two years now. But the bots keep getting smarter and it will probably be a matter of time before they can find a way around todays best defenses.

Good luck on your war with the spammers!