Spam—we all hate it and it’s not just for email anymore, hello Drupal comment spam.

To determine what is effective at preventing Drupal spam, I decided to run a little case study when I redesigned this site and the following are the conclusions I drew from trying a number of different combinations:

First, to enable Captchas you need the captcha module. Don't get fooled by the documentation stating it requires textimage module. It doesn't. Instead it serves simple, text based captchas. I personally prefer text based captchas over image based, since they are a lot less error prone, and they are accessible to (color)blind people, too. Additionally, as I will explain later on, image based captchas can as easily be bypassed as text based ones, so they don't provide additional security.

In an effort to prevent spam on your Drupal website, I've identified 10 modules built specifically for spam protection.

Descriptions taken from each module's Project Page

Captcha

A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test most often placed within web forms to determine whether the user is human. The purpose of CAPTCHA is to block form submissions by spambots, which are automated scripts that post spam content everywhere they can.

Download and enable the flags module

http://drupal.org/project/flag

Flag module is very customizable because it is more flexible and you can integrate it in views.

In order to create a tab in Users's profile, that will lsit their favorite nodes:

1. First create a view
2. Select the fields you want
3. Select an argument uid and connect it to currewnt logged in user
4. Create a page called user/%/favorites

Flag is a flexible flagging system that is completely customizable by the administrator. It will help you to create favorite nodes or shortlist and you can then display the shortlist via a ustom view. Using this module, the site administrator can provide any number of flags for nodes, comments, or users. Some possibilities include bookmarks, marking important, friends, or flag as offensive. With extensive views integration, you can create custom lists of popular content or keep tabs on important content.

http://drupal.org/project/flag

Hierarchial Select lets you create multi level drop down boxes for users to select taxonomy vocabularies and terms from a Page or any other content type.

1. Download from: http://drupal.org/project/hierarchical_select
2. Upload and enable module.
3. Go to Content Management > Taxonomy and click on 'edit vocabulary' next to the desired Vocabulary.
4. Check the checkbox 'Use the Hierarchical Select form element for this vocabulary'.

If you want to create a block or a section on your site listing related or relevant content based on the current node the user is viewing, you can install the Relevant Content module.

Relevant content lets you list related content on the right or left side of your website as desired based on the content the user is currently viewing on the site. (Requires Views Module).

Download from: http://drupal.org/project/relevant_content

To upload files on per nodes basis and associate files to each node, you can download the filefield module from

http://drupal.org/project/filefield

Simply enable the module and then configure it to work with desired content types.

To change the size of the text boxes exposed by Views Filter, icnclude the following code in your style.css file of your current theme:

#edit-fieldname1
{
    width: 175px;
    height: 44px;
}

#edit-fieldname2
{
    width: 175px;
}

Change the fieldname1 and fieldname2 to the name of your fields.

When you include node images, they appear somewhere on your node page. To right align the images and set a certain width of images, include the following code to style.css file of your current theme

.node_images
{
    float: right;
    margin-right: 0px;
    width: 450px;
}