I took Boris’ advise and downloaded and installed the SPAM drupal module. I’m anxious to see how well it does. I realize that I could have just moderated any comments manually, but I didn’t like that idea. This way valid comments will get posted without delay and comment SPAM will get filtered to a moderation queue where I can delete it whenever I get time.
Dave – this is pretty much exactly the functionality I’ve been wanting. I really should take some time to browse what other modules are available…
Since I installed it, it’s caught all 18 pieces of comment SPAM that have been posted to my site, which is fantastic! A couple of small complaints:
1) When viewing the SPAM each one has a checkbox next to it. You can select one, many, or all of them and perform certain operations on them like ‘Unpublish’ or “Mark as not SPAM’, etc. There doesn’t seem to be an option to delete a bunch of them at the same time, I still need to go through each one to delete them. Kind of annoying.
2) I keep seeing the following errors in my admin logs:
warning: Cannot add header information – headers already sent by
user error: Table ‘drupal.spam_surbl_cctlds’ doesn’t exist query
I’m sure I could probably go through the module code and find out why these errors are being generated and fix the problem, and maybe I will, but it’s rather annoying.
I also had a few problems that I had to fix when installing the module to begin with. The MySQL scripts for creating the tables had a few problems. Luckily I was able to figure out what was wrong with them.
All in all, I’m pretty damn happy with the module so far. Glad to see it exists for Drupal 4.6 as well, just in case I ever get around to upgrading. Still haven’t figured out how to upgrade my PHP.
Turns out I’m a bit of an idiot. :)
I had enabled the spam_surbl module without going through the installation of it. The installation of course involves creating the table mentioned above. Oops. That should take care of the second error I was seeing, not sure if it will take care of the warning. We’ll see.
It looks like my first complaint has also been addressed. I really should read though everything when I download something.
There seems to be a patch that can be applied to the comment module to enable bulk deletion. I’m not really sure how to apply the patch though, may need to get some direction on that from Boris. :)
So far this new spam filter has picked up 52 of the 52 pieces of comment spam that have been posted. Talk about sweet! I even set it up to delete them automatically if they contained a certain phrase so I don’t even need to take the time to delete anything. This is awesome!
This thing rocks!