Case Study: Drupal achieves effective spam prevention and fewer fake accounts with Imperva Bot Management

Drupal Prevents Spam using Browser Fingerprinting Technology

Drupal.org, the central site for the million‑plus Drupal open‑source community, was a high‑value target for spammers who created bogus accounts to post SEO link spam across millions of pages. Staff and volunteers spent hours each day manually removing junk, prior defenses like Mollom and Honeypot proved inadequate against real people hiding behind proxies, and fake accounts skewed membership and engagement metrics.

Drupal.org integrated Imperva Bot Management’s browser fingerprinting via the Imperva Cloud CDN into its account‑creation flow to unmask repeat offenders and flag suspicious device fingerprints. In about nine months the system fingerprinted ~20,000 new accounts, identified roughly 10% as likely spam‑related (tracing most activity to a few hundred bad actors), sharply reduced new spammer accounts and cleanup time, and restored cleaner metrics so volunteers could focus on community engagement.

Drupal

Ryan Aslett

Backend Developer Services Engineer