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Drupal's Fight Against Spam with Browser Fingerprinting Technology
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases
Applicable Industries
- Electronics
- Equipment & Machinery
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Time Sensitive Networking
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Drupal.org, a community of over a million developers, designers, trainers, strategists, coordinators, editors, and sponsors, faced a significant challenge with spam. Spammers created bogus accounts to post junk content on Drupal.org's website, which has a highly coveted Google PageRank of 9. This spam was damaging to the Drupal brand and risked lowering its PageRank value. The spam was not automated but posted by actual people, making it harder to mitigate. The staff and community volunteers had to spend considerable time manually identifying and removing spam, with some spending up to half their workday on this task. Additionally, the spammer accounts skewed the community engagement metrics, making it hard to gauge the actual growth and engagement of the community. The spam also took up unnecessary space in the database and backups.
About The Customer
Drupal.org is a community that supports the Drupal development project, an open-source content management software used to create many websites and applications. The community consists of over a million developers, designers, trainers, strategists, coordinators, editors, and sponsors who work together to build the Drupal software, provide support, create documentation, share networking opportunities, and more. The website managed by Drupal.org is the primary gathering point for this development effort. The community is one of the largest open-source development communities in the world, with a shared commitment to the open-source spirit.
The Solution
Drupal.org needed a solution that would reduce the time spent on cleaning up spam. Initially, they tried content filtering using Mollom and a Drupal module called Honeypot, but these were ineffective against human spammers. They then decided to partner with Imperva Bot Management (formerly Distil Networks). The account registration process on Drupal.org was run through the Imperva Cloud CDN, which gathered device fingerprints on every new account. This process revealed information that helped identify and reduce the number of spammers. The data from Imperva showed that about 10% of the new accounts showed indications of being tied to spammers, and there were only about 200 to 300 bad actors creating all the bad accounts. Drupal.org added a manual step to evaluate accounts with duplicate fingerprints more closely, reducing the time spent on dealing with spam.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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