I’m not sure why, but on April 3, 2018, the people behind the Mollom anti-spam module for Drupal basically went out of business. This meant that I either had to disable comments on this site (which I did for a while), or look at other anti-spam modules, which I did over the weekend.
A bad part of two other popular Drupal anti-spam modules (Honeypot and reCAPTCHA) is that if you use them, the result is that they disable caching on your website. (In the case of Honeypot it only disables caching if you use its time-related feature.)
The image here shows a performance effect of using these modules. I turned on these modules at ~17:00 hours today (which is really 1pm, my time), and there was an immediate spike in CPU use. I assume that web pages are also being served slower, and both of these performance side effects are not good for the website business.
There’s one other Drupal anti-spam module I can try that doesn’t disable web page caching, so I’ll take a look at it soon. If that doesn’t work well I’ll either have to turn off the comments again, or write my own module that doesn’t affect caching.
