I was also having a horrible spam problem on my Drupal blog. I tried a spam filter, and it stopped the spam comments from being instantly available, but it also eventually stopped all the real comments, so I had to filter through fifty spams to find one or two real comments. No fun.
Installing the Drupal Captcha module stopped the comment spam cold. It puts an obscured text image on the page whose contents a poster must transcribe. You can enable it for registration, unregistered user comments, and/or registered user comments. It requires GD version 2 and Freetype support from PHP, so check phpinfo.php on your web host for that. I'm using Vera.ttf and VeraSe.ttf as fonts. Found them with a Google search. Ask if you need them. The default fonts don't work very well. These make for a very readable text block.
Give it a try commenting on a post on my blog to get a feel for how it looks.
You may still prefer forcing registration, but this gives you another option.
If your web service provider gives you a shell prompt:
1) Upload the .tar.gz file to your drupal "modules" directory.
2) "cd" to that directory in the shell
3) tar -xzf "captcha*.gz"
(or type out the entire file name instead of using the "*"
If you don't have a shell prompt, then you'll have to decompress the .tar.gz file on your local machine, and upload the files to the "captch" sub-directory of your Drupal "modules" directory.
Finally, from your Drupal home page, logged in as the administrator, go to the "modules" link under the "administer" link, check the box to enable the "captcha" module, click the "Save configuration" button. Then you can configure the captcha module under the "administer" / "settings" link. To make the fonts work, you'll have to upload the two files I mentioned before and tell the captcha module, via its "settings", the location of the directory in which you put them.
Drupal's Captch Module worked for me
I was also having a horrible spam problem on my Drupal blog. I tried a spam filter, and it stopped the spam comments from being instantly available, but it also eventually stopped all the real comments, so I had to filter through fifty spams to find one or two real comments. No fun.
Installing the Drupal Captcha module stopped the comment spam cold. It puts an obscured text image on the page whose contents a poster must transcribe. You can enable it for registration, unregistered user comments, and/or registered user comments. It requires GD version 2 and Freetype support from PHP, so check phpinfo.php on your web host for that. I'm using Vera.ttf and VeraSe.ttf as fonts. Found them with a Google search. Ask if you need them. The default fonts don't work very well. These make for a very readable text block.
Give it a try commenting on a post on my blog to get a feel for how it looks.
You may still prefer forcing registration, but this gives you another option.
Thanks, bill. Will try that
Thanks, bill. Will try that tonight.
--
SayUncle
Can't we all just get a long gun?
Hmm, don't know what to do
Hmm, don't know what to do with tar.gz file.
--
SayUncle
Can't we all just get a long gun?
If your web service provider
If your web service provider gives you a shell prompt:
1) Upload the .tar.gz file to your drupal "modules" directory.
2) "cd" to that directory in the shell
3) tar -xzf "captcha*.gz"
(or type out the entire file name instead of using the "*"
If you don't have a shell prompt, then you'll have to decompress the .tar.gz file on your local machine, and upload the files to the "captch" sub-directory of your Drupal "modules" directory.
Finally, from your Drupal home page, logged in as the administrator, go to the "modules" link under the "administer" link, check the box to enable the "captcha" module, click the "Save configuration" button. Then you can configure the captcha module under the "administer" / "settings" link. To make the fonts work, you'll have to upload the two files I mentioned before and tell the captcha module, via its "settings", the location of the directory in which you put them.