As I prepared to turn on comments and forums, I researched the anti-spam techniques out there for Drupal. There are a lot of great tools, but then it occurred to me: There is a lot of redundancy, and no coordination. See the wonderful list of anti-spam modules.
Would it be a good idea to have a module to coordinate all of these modules, and bind them?
It seems that all of these modules do some or all of the same basic five things:
- Detect spammy behavior (especially bots).
- Block spammy behavior.
- Cache information about potential sources of spam.
- Report sources of spam to a central repository.
- Clean up spammy accounts and content.
Now, they all do this in different ways, particularly the detection part.
However, it seems to me that there could be some sort of "Grand Central Bad Behavior Blocker" (GCBBB) module. It would coordinate all of the actions above amongst different modules. Individual modules would provide one or some of the above services, but wouldn't need to provide all of them.