CAPTCHA: Targeting Spam Issues of Drupal Sites

So your website is already up and running. It seems like you can now sit back and just wait for visitors to flock to your little corner in the Web. But this shouldn’t be the case! Building a website is one thing, and managing, protecting, and maintaining it is another. 

One of the worst enemies of Drupal webmasters is spam. Those evil creatures called spambots can turn an unprotected site into a heap of spam posts and junk messages about pharmacy, diet pills, Viagra, and whatnot. Of course, search engines and human visitors won’t be too pleased about this. So what can you do? Drupal is one of those CMS without built-in anti-spam features, so you’ll have to add modules to guard your beloved site. 

CAPTCHA

The most commonly used anti-spam module is CAPTCHA, which involves the use of image files, ASCII art, or math tests that visitors have to answer correctly to validate against spam. While this should be enough hindrance for many spambots, some still manage to get through it. Hence, you should use other anti-spam modules as well. 

reCAPTCHA

This is increasingly being used by websites to protect against spam. This is because instead of merely ensuring that form submissions are done by human users, reCaptcha also provides you the chance to join a project geared towards improving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. How? The words being used are those that can’t be correctly read by OCR. Hence, users can help digitize old books by providing the right answers. 

NotCaptcha

Unlike the previous modules, users don’t have to enter digits or letters to validate whether they’re human. In NotCaptcha, a user has to vertically align three images using sliders. 

What’s good with the above modules is that Drupal provides the administrator with three persistence options:

• Always add a test
• Omit tests for a particular form if the user has already passed a test for that form
• Omit tests for all forms if the user has already passed a test 

Remember that human users don’t like having to go through many challenges just to be able to submit a form. Hence, you should carefully choose which anti-spam module to use.