SPAM detection

Well this is possible in Drupal5. Just enable both the shoutbox and captcha modules. On the captcha administration page you can enable captcha administration links to appear on each form. Once this is enabled, navigate to a page showing the shoutbox - note, this must be a non-administration page in order for the captcha stuff to appear. Underneath the shoutbox form will be a link allowing you to enable the captcha for the form for untrusted users. You should be able to choose between math, text and image captchas.

I presume this is the same in Drupal 6, will try to test it later if I get a chance.

Cheers,
Stella

Yep, it works the same way in Drupal 6.

I think Stella's solution is the way to go.

I think there may be a small issue if the user enters the captcha incorrectly. It will stop users from posting until the captcha is correct, but the shoutbox itself isn't rendered correctly. It looks like the entire page is displayed in the shoutbox. It's been a little while since I looked at this though, so I may be wrong.

Cheers,
Stella

Re-opening so that i can i look at it latter.

disterics,

Integrating this with Mollom would be a great feature. I was hit today with about 10 spam shouts and had to make it authenticated user's only. Something I really didn't want to do. I have been using Mollom now for about three weeks and it has worked 100% with 100% accuracy, stopping over 600 spam attempts.

Thanks for your support,

After applying CAPTCHA on shoutbox form, the form is posted to CAPTCHA module for validation and its response is normally a whole page output. I made a small change in shoutbox-form.js by replacing ajaxForm(options) function with submit() function.

//$("#shoutbox-add-form").ajaxForm(options);
$("#shoutbox-add-form").submit();

I do not know if it is still problematic.

It seems that submit() is not working right with captcha as it keeps showing errors even when i'm not clicking anything. So, I tried making this submit without () and it worked then. Strange things happen.

Hi, I'm battling multiple spam attacks a day right now. I have added a CAPTCHA to the shoutbox_add_form, but the problem is - it only shows up for a little while after I clear the cache, but goes away shortly after. No anonymous user is able to post, because drupal still expects an answer to the math question even when it's not there on the form. I have block caching disabled, even added a $blocks[0]['cache'] = BLOCK_NO_CACHE; to the block but still it does not help. Does anybody have an idea how to make it work? Help would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE:
Never mind, I copied over some code from the tribune module and search every posted shout for banned expressions - those that match are not saved to the database. That's even better by not harassing regular users with CAPTCHA's.

Can you post more info about this (@ #12)

I would recommend using spamicide!!! There is no need to implement a solution for shoutbox. Had the same problem, installed spamicide:
http://drupal.org/project/spamicide

But it didn't work?!? -> Installed the patch from
http://drupal.org/node/722014 -> the last one (!): patch_83_rev2.patch
No it is perfectly abandoning spam, without any user having to deal with CAPTCHA-tasks!

Restored issue title

Sorry, haven't been here for a while. If somebody wants it here's what I described in post #12. There's some polish text hard-written in there but I don't have time to clean that up right now. Should be easy to find and change though. There's a new text area on the admin page where you can put the expressions that will be banned. That spamicide module mentioned in #14 looks nice too.

Just remembered, I also added saving of the IP address for each post, visible only to members of a specific rank - the name of the rank has to be set on line #323 of that file if you want to have it displayed (on the pop-up text where the time is). It's all a bit provisional but it was never intended for any kind of release, just for my own site...

+1