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 ;)
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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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