Making the web friendly again

There are more than a few Drupal modules and 3rd party services on the internet for trying to manage the flood of spam that websites regularly receive. However, many family-friendly websites need to go beyond merely blocking crude ads. They need to also fight off the hordes of forum trolls and instigators.

A few services fill this role, such as the excellent WebPurify web-service (nominal yearly fee). We developed our WebPurify module for Drupal while working with PBS. Being one of THE family-oriented destinations on the Internet, they couldn’t let anything pass that wasn’t “COOKIE MONSTER APPROVED”.

Luckily for us, and Cookie Monster, WebPurify exposes a simple REST API, using the now common XML-over-HTTP paradigm. Their documentation lays out the request and response formats, and even provides a simple PHP example. Our module provides a nice wrapper around the intracies of using this REST interface, and even provides comment filtering right out of the box. The exposed API even lets other Drupal developers use WebPurify in their modules.