Lately, “form spam” has been the bane of my existence. Anyone who runs more than one or two Web sites has probably had the experience of dealing with what can amount to hundreds of junk messages a day coming through different types of Web-based contact forms. “Report a bug,” “Contact the Web team,” “Write a letter to the Editor,” etc. — they’re all targets for malicious spam bots and their ilk.

Recently I decided to double my previous efforts to find some solutions to Web-based form abuse.

Many of the organizations that I’m working with rely on a number of different systems to deliver content to the Web, which makes it more challenging to find a one-size-fits-all solution. That said, they all use a LAMP stack and several of them are using the Drupal content-management system in some capacity, e.g., to provide some front-end interactivity, user management, etc. So, the real opportunity was to find something that either played nice with Drupal, or was built in PHP/Perl/Python so that it could be integrated with Drupal where necessary. read more »

Good article quoting the usual suspects over at Charity Village:

Unless you work in IT, you probably don’t give much thought to whether the software you use is licensed or open source, freeware or shareware; you just want it to work properly. But with the flexibility and affordability that open source and shareware programs can offer, some nonprofits are taking a closer look. Find out about the available software alternatives and whether they might be right for your organization in this week’s cover story at: http://www.charityvillage.com/cv/news/cover.asp

(Not sure how long that link will work, so let me know if it’s not working.)

Also fun to see that all those lessons on dealing with spam have finally paid off for Mark Greenspan. Mark was over for dinner on the weekend and couldn’t stop talking about the Net Neutrality panel (lots of familiar names there) that he is helping to program at Next Media 2007.

Recently, I asked a colleague why I couldn’t comment on their fancy, new, corporate blog and this was their response:

Yeah, it’s pretty unfortunate at the moment, I’ve had to turn off commenting for unregistered users on the site, because we were getting spammed so heavily and even though I had the Spam filter on at full strength many were still getting through. I’d like to find a better solution, though, because right now you have to create an account to be able to post comments (which nobody will do, I’m sure). If you have any wisdom or suggestions from your Drupal experience on how to deal with such massive spamming issues, I’d love to glean some knowledge

At the risk of attracting a line-up of comment spammers determined to make me look bad, I offer the following recipe for fighting comment spam with Drupal (as I do on my Drupal-powered blog): read more »