BotScout

Overview

The BotScout module for Drupal is an anti-bot module that prevents bots from registration and submitting forms on your site.

Requirements

The BotScout module does not rely on any other modules.
It does require that you get a free API key from www.botscout.com

Features

• Stop bots from submitting any form on your site that has a username or email field (as of 8.x-2.0)
• Block bots by name, email, ip, or any combination of the three
• see how many bots have been blocked

How it works

I wanted to have bot control as do many others and know there are many other modules that do this through many different methods. My anti-bot module works by utilizing a database of known bots. These bots are caught using a few various methods. The main way is through the use of honeynets. The bots information is then entered into a database which get queries through enumeration of a url that contains the data you want to query from the database. The database then returns to you a response code that is tested to see if a bot was found. I hope to allow users to use this technique to keep their sites safe from bots and spam. My program simply provides a way to add botscout functionality to your Drupal site and keep users from creating an account, or submitting forms based on their ip, name, email, or any combination of the three.Information on exactly how botscout catches bots please visit www.botscout.com. My module checks the data submitted on the registration form and optionally the site-wide contact form. to see if the user is a bot by the filters that are selected (ip, name, email) If they are
not found in the botscout database, the information they provided to the form is then gets submitted. If they are found to be a bot the form is not submitted but gives an error to the user.

WARNING

Enabling BotScout on all forms will enable it on the login form.
The user 'admin' is in the botscout database
If you filter for username and your administrators name is admin you will be blocked!
DO NOT use the username of admin, instead use a different username and give it administrative privileges

Information regarding forms

There is now a feature as of version 8.x-2.0 to enable checking on all forms.
For this to work there are some requirements. First the form must have a field to gather either a username or an email, without atleast one of these we can't check the database unless you are filtering for IP which is highly not recommended due to non static IP's, public IP's, and VPN's. you can read more about why this is not recommended on the botscout site itself.

The next requirement is the name of the fields on your form. the only way to tell what field provides the correct information is to match the field name. If you think another field name should be added please let us know. The field name can typically be changed easily, the WebForm module allows this easily when creating a new element. When you are naming the element you will see Key: name where name is what needs to match below. There is an edit field to adjust it if needed. Make sure the field matches one of the choices from the below table.

Information and allowed field names

User

• user
• username
• name

Email

• email
• mail

Notes about 7.x-x.x

The newest features will not be backported to the 7.x versions of the module. This is due to limitations of D7 and also the fact that it is being deprecated. We are busy preparing to port the module to the upcoming D9. Besides if you have not upgraded by now you should start planning to.

Note regarding the statistics collection

Statistics collection has been added in version 8.x-2.0.
The reason for this is to ensure that the new feature to enable BotScout on all forms is working as expected. There is no personal data collected, the only information sent over is the information sent to the BotScout API. Additionally we do not collect your API key only the username, email, and IP of the person you are trying to test against the BotScout API depending on what filters you have enabled. We ask that you leave this feature on so we can ensure smooth performance of the module. There is an option to opt out of the collection of this information and this feature will be removed in 8.x-2.1 once we feel the feature is not causing any issues. leaving this feature on will help us identify issues before they are reported and mainstream fixes for any issues we encounter.
We have done thorough testing and don't expect to see issues but it is impossible to test every scenario. If you do suspect any issues please file a bug report so we can resolve it as quickly as possible.

The mission and the future of this project

The mission is to stop bots from spamming your site so you can focus on the important administration tasks.
In the future I plan on bringing back email alerts as daily reports.
I hope that my module can make administration of people's sites much easier. I will take user feedback into consideration to update the module to be better for those who use it.
Please share any feature requests that you think will make this module better.

Preview Screenshots

BotScout Menu

BotScout Administration Page

BotScout Footer