By maki124 on

For various reasons I have anonymous comments allowed on my site, though with moderation.

The last couple of days someone from the same IP has been leaving comments with no subject and no comment body somehow. I have the math CAPTCHA module but somehow they are bypassing this.

It's easy enough to ban the IP of course but - how is this person bypassing or defeating the math captcha, not to mention getting the comment through even though the comment field is required?

(and I do have to allow anon comments since many of the site visitors are 'blog newbies'. If I don't leave the comments open they email me with questions instead...)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Christefano-oldaccount’s picture

Christefano-oldaccount commented

Perhaps you can use node comments and add a custom checkbox to your comment form that says "[] I agree to the terms of use." That might foil your comment spammer.

I haven't a clue as to what's happening. Let us know if you find out what's going on.

Christefano-oldaccount’s picture

Christefano-oldaccount commented

Just came across another discussion that mentions a Form Riddler module:

  http://drupal.org/node/124669

It lets you add a question to your comment forms (such as "Is drupal.org the name of this website?") and set a correct answer. Comments that are submitted with the wrong answer get discarded.

mfer’s picture

mfer commented

What version of captcha are you using? The 5.x-1.x line of captcha had some exploits that could be bypassed. There is a new 5-2.0 version that is a complete rewrite. It is supposed to fix those issues.

You may want to try using the spam module (http://drupal.org/project/spam) and configure it to look for those comments.

--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com

maki124’s picture

maki124 commented

Upgrading to the latest version of captcha as Matt suggested seems to have done the trick - or at least, there haven't been any of those 'empty' comments in the last few hours.

I also double-checked that captcha wasn't throttled - I'm pretty sure it wasn't, but it isn't now anyway. (I should note that I recently had to tweak the throttle settings due to a rather sudden increase in traffic, so I may have inadvertently done something.)

Changing to node comments wasn't really an option for this site since it has thousands of past comments that quite often contain useful info. (I'm not sure if changing from comments.module to nodecomments would lose the old comments...) , not to mention that I'm very wary of using a beta module on a live site.

(The site in question is here if you're interested)

Thanks for all your suggestions and help! I'll report back if the above didn't fix things.

Maki
http://www.makikoitoh.com

funana’s picture

funana commented

Check if captcha is throttled. I noticed the same strange thing on a drupal 4.7 page. The solution was that we accidentialy checked the "throtteling" box at the captcha module... The Spammers came with a lot of bots which caused the system to throttle some modules. Then there was no captcha anymore and they could spam...

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Christefano-oldaccount’s picture

Christefano-oldaccount commented

Here are two other Drupalistas who are getting blank comments and what they did about it:

  http://deekayen.net/block-comment-spam-russia
  http://www.thingy-ma-jig.co.uk/blog/08-05-2007/spamming-russians

teledyn’s picture

teledyn commented

I didn't get blank comments, I got hundreds of spam comments, dozens of them saying "Did you really think that would work?"

i've disabled the public commenting (again) and disabled new account registrations on most sites until this gets sorted out -- thanks for the tip on the module rewrite, I'll try that.

btw, anyone know if there's a Drupal bridge to http://recaptcha.net/ ?

Christefano-oldaccount’s picture

Christefano-oldaccount commented

There's a new reCAPTCHA module for Drupal.

  http://drupal.org/project/recaptcha