On April 2, 2018, Acquia retired Mollom, a spam fighting tool built by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. As Dries tells the story, Mollom was both a technical and financial success but was ultimately shut down to enable Acquia to deploy its resources more strategically. At its peak, Mollom served over 60,000 websites, including many of ours!

Many sites are looking for alternatives now that Mollom is shut down. One such service Commerce Guys integrated earlier this year in anticipation of Mollom's closing is Human Presence, a fraud prevention and form protection service that uses multiple overlapping strategies to fight form spam. In the context of Drupal, this includes protecting user registration and login forms, content creation forms, contact forms, and more.

Similar to Mollom, Human Presence evaluates various parameters of a visitor's session to decide if the visitor is a human or a bot. When a protected form is submitted, the Drupal module requests a "human presence" confidence rating from the API (hence the name), and if the response does not meet a configurable confidence threshold, it will block form submission or let you configure additional validation steps if you choose. For example, out of the box, the module integrates the CAPTCHA module to rebuild the submitted form with a CAPTCHA that must be completed before the form will submit.

We believe Human Presence is a great tool to integrate on its own or in conjunction with other standalone modules like Honeypot. Furthermore, they're joining other companies like Authorize.Net, Avalara, and PayPal as Drupal Commerce Technology Partners. Their integration includes support for protecting shopping cart and checkout forms, and we are looking for other ways they can help us combat payment fraud in addition to spam.

Learn more about Human Presence or reach the company's support engineer through their project page on drupal.org.