One of the joys of designing and deploying Drupal distributions is when a new module is released. The developers working on the extended modules for Drupal truly make this the ideal open source CMS for most websites these days. (That's why we use it as our core for nearly all of our web projects.)

Our most recent delight: Jeremy of Kerneltrap has released a completely rewritten spam module, "Spam 2.0." Among its features:

• Written in PHP specifically for Drupal.
• Highly configurable.
• Automatically detects and unpublishes spam comments and other spam content.
• Automatically learns to detect spam in any language using Bayesian logic.
• Automatically learns and blocks spammer URLs.
• Automatically blacklists IPs of learned spammers, preventing them from posting additional spam and wasting database resources.
• Detects repeated postings of the same identical content.
• Detects content containing too many links, or the same link over and over.
• Supports the creation of custom filters using powerful regular expressions.
• Can notify the user that his or her content was determined to be spam, preventing confusion over why their content doesn't show up.
• Can notify the site administrator in an email when spam is detected.
• Provides simple administrative interfaces for reviewing spam content.
• Provides comprehensive logging to offer an understanding as to how and why content is determined to be or not to be spam.

We'll be trying this out right away and comparing the experience with the existing spam modules (also developed by Jeremy). Hopefully, with some pre-emptive sniffing of spamalicious content, we can open up our comments to non-registered users on our various sites.

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