Its been about 1 year since I launched andremolnar 2.0. Obviously with this sort of site I wanted to have comments enabled and not force people to register or pass some human validation test (captcha) just so they can have their say (not that anybody actually bothers to comment on here). But, you don't also want to be swamped with comment spam.

At the time there weren't any comment spam-bots that posted to drupal based sites, but there were still comment spam sweat shops doing the work manually. So, as a precaution I installed the spam module. Every once and a while I would get notified of some spammer trying to clog my site, but no action was needed. Spam messages were quarantined.

Well, in the past few weeks it turns out that the spam bots have finally been programmed to tackle drupals comment forms. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that Drupal has enough traction in the world that someone has taken the time to write a bot to post comments to Drupal sites. The bad news of course is that someone has taken the time to write a bot to post comments to Drupal sites.

The really bad news is that I'm getting about 100 spam comments a day. The REALLY GOOD NEWS is that spam module keeps up and virtually none of it gets posted on the site. You likely wouldn't know that I was getting that much spam by looking at the site. Spam module kicks spam's ass.

Which brings me to the title of this post. Comment spammers are stupid. They are quite literally brainless. Scripts and bots are great at doing repetative tasks, but they are often too stupid to know when they are failing.

Now if I were an evil genius I would write a script that attempts to post spam and come back to crawl the site later to see if it worked. If it did, the site goes on a white list and is open for spamming. If it fails, the site goes on a black list and no more resources are wasted attacking it. I would then, being said evil genius, sell my white list to other spammers.

And if I were I am a super evil genius I would start building intelligent comment spam that created links to other white listed spam targets thereby creating a global link farm out of my targets.

But, I'm not an evil genius, so I'm not going to do that.

Anyway, if I haven't already said enough nice things about Drupal, I can say one more nice thing. If you want a spam free blog, Drupal is the way to go.

andre