By ishotthesheep on

Hi, not an experienced webmaster, so treat me gently...i just need one piece of advice.

I currently have a website on WordPress which is overwhelmed by spam, no matter what my technical people do with filters. They want me to move to Drupal which is apparently much better at blocking spam.

Can someone tell me if i am likely to see a marked difference or will i just be wasting my money?

Cheers,

Rob

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

femrich’s picture

femrich commented

in my experience, in either case dealing with spam depends more on the options installed than on drupal vs. wordpress. I've found the Akismet system at wordpress.com very effective at blocking spam. Local installs of wordpress offer an akismet plug-in, also. For my Drupal site, I use the Akismet module, which relies on the system created by wordpress.

All I've needed for either my drupal or wordpress sites has been akismet plus some settings designed to stop spammers in the basic setup. but both also offer other popular anti-spam tools.

in my opinion, spam protection is not a good reason to switch from wordpress to drupal. Given the right application of the available tools, either one should do a reasonably good job of dealing with spam, and i suspect either is about equally vulnerable...

rernst’s picture

rernst commented

I agree, femrich, that moving a platform is a bad reason to switch.

to OP:

What are you using for spam prevention already?

Lately, akismet and spam karma 2 have become less effective, as I've seen more spam creep.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I agree, femrich. Akismet is liked the hooked on phonics for blog spam control, as far as I've experienced.

ishotthesheep’s picture

ishotthesheep commented

...that the site did very well, very quickly. We had Akismet but still kept being bombarded. I was having to manually delete about 500 comments a day and it didn't let up.

My tech man has suggested that because he knows Drupal better, he could get it working better on there. I'm flying in the dark a bit here, not being great with computers (despite being an online journalists...oh dear).

The site is called www.eofj.org in case you're interested.

femrich’s picture

femrich commented

Perhaps if your tech person is more confident about being able to protect a drupal site rather than a wordpress site, then a switch may help reduce the spam problem more quickly. But I don't know of any technical reason that drupal would be considered significantly better or worse, as far as spam goes, than wordpress.

Having said that, I'd suggest also that you consider whether you might want your site to grow beyond the weblog model. If so, a switch to drupal sooner rather than later might be a good idea.

fyi, an interesting site, but your links to about the end of journalism and such are returning 404 errors for me. Maybe this is a better reason to switch to drupal, if it means your tech person can overcome that...

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

I think you're getting some good and honest advice here: Neither software package has any particular advantage over the other in terms of spam deterrence. However, I notice that neither Askimet nor even a basic CAPTCHA challenge is installed on your Wordpress site, so you can expect to get script-driven spam.

By the way, I read your most recent post and have to take issue with the reference to "the Brave New World towards which our editors are leading us." It is not editors who are leading, but rather the general population of so-called consumers who are adopting the participatory Web as a preferred place to spend their time and attention. I warned of this in my 1999 speech at the NetMedia conference.

Scott Reynolds’s picture

Scott Reynolds commented

I would like to point out that your site currently doesn't employ akismet or ANY spam prevention currently. I was able to post a comment without passing a test.

I would say that the spam prevention on either system is about equal only if you use it ;)

ishotthesheep’s picture

ishotthesheep commented

Thanks for all of your comments, i was surprised to find that we weren't running Akismet, because i had been told that we were. Heads will roll...

As for the comment about my post, i take your point, but was writing with tongue exploring cheek, if not firmly in it.

Again, thanks for your help

Rob

femrich’s picture

femrich commented

A heads up here: If there is one thing that Wordpress does have over Drupal, it's simplicity. I mention this only because, well, if I found that a web designer couldn't figure out how to implement Akismet in Wordpress, and worse, couldn't even figure out whether it was correctly installed, then no way would I trust that person to do anything with Drupal...

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

I too had a lot of WordPress spam. So much I just ignored my Aksimet queue. (I'd look occasionally and when it was nearing 1000 I'd mass delete them.)

Now that that site is on Drupal, it still gets spam. Not as much, mind you, but enough to be annoying.

I have the Akismet module installed and it does a good job of handling the spam. (But you get a different kind of Drupal spammer - they actually use the title field.)

Spam is spam, no matter what platform you use. If Drupal is the right system for you, then go with it. Spam shouldn't be a main consideration considering Drupal has a few different modules to help deal with it.

~silverwing

_____________________________________________
MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

VValdo’s picture

VValdo commented

I'm not sure why more people aren't using Recaptcha & captcha modules... I find they are a great combo and so far anyway haven't had a spam issue..

W

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

I'm going to install a captcha module on my site soon, but I personally hate them. Especially those squiggly letter/numbers kind that you stare at it and can't make out what they're supposed to be.

But those silly answers ones I'll try. "I have a cat. What animal do I have?" might be okay for me.

~silverwing - who thinks people who want to comment on his site should have to jump through hoops to do so

_____________________________________________
MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

pnlnl’s picture

pnlnl commented

but i think you're being harsh on the captcha module; yes when you set it up right from the box, it gives awkward images that humans can't figure out, but with a good font and some configuration it works perfectly...

CAD bloke’s picture

CAD bloke commented

Just as I was reading this a spambot registered on my forum & posted an ad. It cracked a relatively mild captcha so I upped the settings.

So, FYI if it's too easy to read then the bots can read it.

My site is pretty-much empty, low traffic too so I'm surprised a bot noticed it.

webengr’s picture

webengr commented

don't think spambots try to spam with ACSI art tests, especially if they don't know the start/stop flags
http://www.figlet.org/
FIGlet is a program for making large letters out of ordinary text, think php pear has support for it..

I think undeadly.org for example uses it for the test.