Hey everyone, we’re still here and wanted to update our readers with something we changed here on the site. One thing we get a lot of here at Switch On The Code is spam, mostly comment spam on posts. This causes a couple issues, first is trying to put something in place to reduce the amount of manual work done to remove spam. On this front we have long used the hashcash module which has performed decently. It captures nearly all of the spam comments we were getting but has a problem stopping legitimate people from posting comments. Not to mention the module is not being actively developed at all. So, we changed what we are using.
The Spam module is our new filtration system. It uses a combination of filters to check the content of a post (comment) and decide whether it is spam or not. Basically each filter that is run on the content gives it a score of 1-99, 1 being the worst spam possible and 99 being good content. Once done the values are averaged and if the average score fall under a threshold then the post is marked as spam and thrown into spam hell. What this all means it is takes a little bit of work to get everything setup perfectly and that means there will some false positives (not many we hope) and some spam that gets through (more likely). While you can speculate what settings will work best the only real way to get it dialed in is run it on the actual site. Which we are doing.
Please bear with us if you see any spam in comments on post and we are really, really sorry if your comment doesn’t make it through. I promise we will improve the spam filters as time goes by. If you have any other suggestions or use something different on Drupal then let us know and we’ll check it out as well.