"Kill spam". Sounds beautiful doesn't it?
I'd gotten irritated with the amount of spam comments we were getting on xn--e1ale9b.xn--j1aef.xn--p1acf so I decided to try a new module out. I was looking around on Drupal.org and noticed Mollom, a new module that's being used by Sony BMG, Adobe, Warner Bros and FastCompany, among others.
The great thing about Mollom is that it doesn't stop your users from posting comments with ugly CAPTCHAs unless it's concerned that they might not be human. In other words, people can carry on using your site as usual and, only once in a while, they'll get shown a screen to confirm their human-ness.
Let's face it, people-submitted content runs the internet. We're slowing our own growth down by putting hundreds of barriers between our users' comments and us. So, by using intelligent text-analysis and other goodies, Mollom makes it possible for us to focus on great content instead of blocking people.
Mollom is actively developed and maintained by Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of Drupal core.
Tags: mollom, comment spam, spam
Posted in
It's frustrating to have to log in to your site, over and over again, just to delete some bozo's worthless spammy comments.
The fix? Ask your Drupal site to remember you :D
Posted in
Regardless of what type of Drupal site you run, you should probably install and use some form of CAPTCHA system. I've played with some of the options and they range from cumbersome to almost-useful but, alas, in this world of constant spam, we have to choose something somewhere in between that range or we'll be inundated with irritating viagra comments all day long!
reCAPTCHA is a very effective CAPTCHA system that uses words that are particularly difficult for machines to "read" but that humans can manage reasonably easily. This killed all my spam but it also scared some barely literate commenters as well so I don't really recommend it.
Drupal's vanilla CAPTCHA module offers a Mathematical question which seems to do the trick but it's just way too easy to program a script to solve the Math, so I'm not sure for how much longer it will still be effective.
And then you get the ubiquitous CAPTCHA method that involves jumbled, random letters which your faithful and (hopefully) determined user needs to repeat into a text-box in order to post a comment. Generally effective but my experiences with Drupal's versions of this CAPTCHA have involved too many bugs and hair-pulling, so I steer clear.
So, let's play it safe and stick to the Math question. It mostly works ;)
Posted in
I've found out, over the past 7 years or so, that you can offer somebody the EXACT same thing as what someone else is offering but, if you can make it LOOK easier to use your version, guess what? You win!
So I've put this into a new category called "Presentation Modules" because even the best content needs to be displayed well.
On to our topic of conversation... tagadelic.
Tagadelic, by itself, allows you to add a block of the most popular tags on your web site. Great for visitors to see what you / your users write about most.
I think it makes surfing a site a little more fun as it kinda gives you an idea of where you should be looking for the good stuff.
It becomes a lot more powerful, however, when you start working with the API. Then you can show them which tags are the most popular -- by visits to articles in that category. Now that's WAY more useful and fun but it requires some coding.
I've used tagadelic on Free Articles' home page. I just use the "normal" version but I'm quite happy with the results so far. Give it a go, ESPECIALLY if you've got a busy blog :)
Posted in
Techies are notorious for hating anything marketing- or sales-related. Well, at least we start out that way. Some of us eventually grow to realise that that's how you make money and eventually start appreciating it.
That's me -- I started out as a techie but now I'm an online marketer with a technical background so I just love it when I found a smart way to do something marketing-related.
(And, of course, anything to do with Drupal is smart ;))
Enter slidebox.
Slidebox allows you to create those cheesy slide-down "pop-ups" that ask people to sign up for your free report, newsletter, ebook or other goodie. They're useful because they're effective, unblockable and less irritating than traditional pop-ups.
When I say effective, I'm talking about 25% conversation rate successful -- so you know it's good!
We've used this on www.SpotOnForex.com and now, for a new client, on www.FaithLikeMLM.co.za. Whether you trust Forex and MLM businesses or not is irrelevant. These goodies work!
The way it works is that the slidebox module will use a view as its content. Not the easiest method of getting this done but still useful if you want to randomise your pop-ups for testing purposes.
I'd recommend using a little bit of CSS wizardry to hide the node and view titles like so:
.slidebox-container h2 { display: none; }
.slidebox-container .links,
.slidebox-container .postmetadata,
.slidebox-container .node_read_more { display: none; }
Some day soon (or when I feel like it) I'm going to modify this module so you can simply select a node to display in the pop-up and I think I'll add the option to disable everything but the node-contents. I think that will make it easier for non-techie types to use this module on their own sites.
By the way, using this with TinyMCE + the TinyMCE forms module that's lingering around the net somewhere will make your life much easier as you won't have to worry about coding the HTML by hand.
Let me know if you want the link to the TinyMCE forms module I use.
Posted in
Massive web sites with tens of thousands of articles don't tend to run well on Drupal, even with aggressive caching enabled.
Judging from the reading I've been doing on the subject recently, the problem seems to be that Drupal empties its cache when a node is updated. I'm not sure how true that is but, the fact of the matter is, my site (www.freearticles.co.za) was consistently grinding to a hault at peak times and not even aggressive caching was helping.
Now, to save costs, I host the site on a shared host in the US, so setting up a proxy on the server isn't an option to me. In fact, most things people normally suggest (including optimizing the MySQL config) just isn't an option.
So I needed to find a way to improve performance while staying within the limits of the functionality available to me on a shared server.
Enter Boost.
Boost is a Drupal module that creates static HTML versions of pages visited on your site and then serves them up on subsequent requests for the same page.
So, the first time a page is accessed, it's pulled out of the database and there's all sorts of database and PHP overheads on that call. After that, requests to the same page skip PHP and the databaase altogether and serve up plain HTML.
The performance boost is ridiculously impressive. I haven't done any sort of benchmarks as that's really not my thing but I can see and feel the difference and my earnings are steadily increasing.
The module has a problem with the .htaccess file that ships with it but I've solved it for you here.
I still need to do a proper write-up of the fix but if you're reading this, you can probably handle a little techie stuff to get your site going.
Give it a shot and let us know what your results are like!
Posted in
The last thing you want is a bunch of people registering on your site with fake email addresses. It usually results in untraceable spamming and a whole lot of admin.
Nip the problem in the bud by using Drupal's "verify email" module. You simply install it and configure some basics and, just like that, you've probably halved the amount of spam that will end up on your web site!
The email verify module can be irritating when it doesn't work properly, especially if you've configured it to actually check that the domain exists but I say that it's an annoyance we can live with.
For the sake of your sanity, I highly recommend this one! Especially if you're expecting a lot of registrations each day.
Posted in
Drupal was made for community web sites but it lacks some of the most important features that a site like that requires.
One of those features (for a new site) is to be notified when someone registers so you can check out their profile, welcome them to the community and generally get the ball rolling.
As an example, I run a free article directory and I like keeping tabs on new users so that I can spot a spammer quickly and put an end to the trouble before it even begins!
The solution is a Drupal module called (quite aptly) User registration notification. It's very easy to install and each time someone registers on your site, you get emailed with a link to check out their profile.
Now, on my article site, that means that I also see any articles they've added as they're displayed on their profile.
It's this ability to add simple, focused modules that do their job really well that makes Drupal (like Linux) such a pleasure and so damned flexible! There's nothing you can't do in Drupal!
Posted in
Drupal's commenting module is great. You can prevent anonymous people from posting junk by forcing that role to require approval before comments are approved.
Great stuff but a pain in the butt if you forget to log in to your site every now and again and check out the approval queue!
Comment mail allows you to set up your site like a regular blog so you get notified about new comments and each mail even includes links to approve or delete the comment it's mailing you about - brilliant!
Configuring it is a cinch - just install it and wait :)
Posted in
Admin menu is another one of those modules that I don't know how I'd live without! Before discovering it, I found Drupal a pain in the butt to administer. Reloading the page each time I tried to find something in the admin menu really slows things down.
For those of us that administer more than one web site, Admin menu is especially useful and a time-saver. It makes it easy to administer any site without spending too much time thinking about it.
To enable the Admin menu, download install the module as usual and then, after that, go to the "blocks" admin section of your site. This will automatically install and display the Admin menu for you.
If your Admin menu simply isn't showing up, make sure you have code like this in your template, right after the body tag:
<?php echo $header; ?>
Some templates come configured that way already but knowing this little tidbit of advice could save you some frustration when you find that, no matter what you do, your Admin menu simply won't work.
It takes some getting used to but you only have to go through that once and then all your sites will be easy to manage and administer.
Posted in
Chris Luckhardt is a Canadian web media specialist, working in industry since the late 1990s. Over the course of his career in Canada, Chris has worked with countless technologies, equally splitting his time between the worlds of design and development. 
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