This afternoon, I notice, this site got hit by a "sell nike jordan dunk" spammer on the Drupal forum. I run a small Drupal site for young writers and have been inundated by the robots behind this kind of stuff for the last two months. It has not only been annoying but very discouraging.
I have been involved with the Web since 1993. I won't bore you with my unusual history of engagement with the Internet, but I will tell you that while the Web's potential is vast, the robot spammers are the biggest threats to that potential that we face. They have, in my opinion, brought email to its knees and made this technology very inefficient -- spam protections and blocks have made reliable email communication impossible and we now spend countless hours trying to thwart the little buggers. Now referral spam, comment spam, harvesters and the like are, in my opinion, threatening organizations' ability to engage like-minded users and to create stable and safe learning communities. And as more protections are developed in this area, this, too, will affect the actual functionality of the CMS's used on the Web sites.
I wish there were a way that we could band together to go full bore on this problem. I wish that, in all frankness, less attention was spent on developing Drupal 6 and more was spent on how to protect the many Drupal sites now in existence.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
