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Dear Readers,

On January 15, the Drupal community will mark a historic milestone with the launch of Drupal CMS 1.0, coinciding with Drupal’s 24th anniversary. Over 40 community-hosted parties are planned globally, along with a virtual celebration for those unable to attend in person. This event highlights over two decades of innovation and collaboration within the Drupal ecosystem.

Drupal CMS represents a significant advancement in open-source content management, offering a fully composable platform designed for developers, marketers, and site builders. With a user-centric design, enterprise-grade tools, and unparalleled flexibility, it enables the creation of dynamic and powerful digital experiences. Its low-code/no-code features and seamless integration with marketing tools make it an accessible and versatile solution for organizations of all sizes.  

The launch celebrates the creativity and dedication of the global Drupal community. Participants are encouraged to share innovative contributions, such as artwork, videos, or performances, on Slack (#drupal-cms-launch), with the most creative entries rewarded during a livestream event. This milestone is both a testament to Drupal’s legacy and a showcase of the vibrant community driving its future.

Amongst all the anticipation for Drupal CMS v1 release, stay tuned for The DropTimes special edition newsletter featuring Drupal CMS release and launch parties.

• Accessibility Always a Focus in Drupal! - A Conversation with Gareth Alexander, Starshot Track Lead for Accessibility Tools

• Building a Schema.org-First Future with the Schema.org Blueprints Module for Drupal
• Drupal 7 End of Life: What It Means and How to Move Forward
• SimplyTest.me: A Tool for Effortless Drupal Testing
• Drupal CMS Release Candidate Available for Testing
• Navigating Authentic Contribution in Open Source: A Call to Action

• Apply by Jan 31 to Lead at DrupalCon Atlanta’s Nonprofit Summit!
• Drupal Dev Days 2025: Take a Look at the Venue and Travel Options
• CMS Kickoff 2025: Where the CMS Community Connects and Grows
• Events of the Week: January 13 - 19, 2025

• AddWeb Solution Extends Support for Drupal 7 Through 2025
• Backdrop CMS Recognizes Drupal 7 End of Life, Announces Next Steps
• Varbase 10.0.3 Released: Simplifying Drupal Development

We acknowledge that there are more stories to share. However, due to selection constraints, we must pause further exploration for now.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can also join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thank you, 
Sincerely 
Alka Elizabeth 
Sub-editor, The DropTimes.

Fighting spam is an ongoing arms race. There will always be nefarious attempts to post unwanted content onto websites, that's just the nature of the global internet nowadays, but can we keep ahead of it? Some techniques are complex, maybe using AI / natural language processing, but there are also quite simple opportunities to reject spam. 

We had a lot of contact requests come into our site that used the Cyrillic script - which is used for the Russian language. (привет!) Realistically we're very unlikely to treat any request that comes to us in Cyrillic as something worth responding to. We're a UK web agency with most of our clients based in the UK, and whilst we do work with clients outside the UK, and for projects using languages other than English, we can afford to ignore any requests made to us in a language we don't usually read. Given that, we can immediately block a large proportion of the spam requests by simply detecting what alphabet they look to have been written in. Most of this will be Russian, because so much spam comes through Russia.

Drupal makes it easy for us to add an extra validation handler to our contact form with a form alter hook. We could then get on with creating custom logic to check whether submissions contained too much Cyrillic text. We needed to account for a few things:

• How much Cyrillic content is there, in comparison to content from the Latin alphabet (a-z)?

  Although much of the unwanted content was using Cyrillic, we realised content in anything other than the Latin alphabet could probably be rejected in the same way. We're just not likely to do much business with people who can't contact us in English, let alone in an alphabet we can't read.

• How much is too much?

  We will happily accept some amount of Cyrillic text in a contact request - for example, if someone is explaining about spam they are receiving, or asking to add some translations to a site.

• Ignore links and HTML tags, since those are written using a-z characters from the Latin alphabet.

  We've also seen a lot of spam containing links formatted in an unusual format which we could strip: [url=http...]...[/url]

• Ignore whitespace and punctuation, to some extent.

  We're going to end up using some regular expressions from PHP, so we can make use of its support for matching character scripts. For example, /[^\p{Common}\p{Latin}]/u will match any character that is NOT in either of the 'common' (punctuation etc) or Latin sets of characters.

• We decided to ignore the potential for characters which are defined by multiple bytes (like emojis 👀) to interfere with calculating the proportion of non-Latin text. There are rarely that many of them in a message ... and pragmatically, do we really want to be doing business with people communicating using so many emojis?? (This is only for our website's contact form, they can always flood us with emojis later! 😄)

• How can we best guide genuine leads to contact us more appropriately?

  Drupal allows us to set the error message when failing form validation. We would quite like to advise real human beings who want to pay us money for our services, how best to do that!

All these things boiled down to a relatively simple form validation callback, that is just stuffed with a few bits of code that are relatively unusual, such as those regex script classes:

So now users see this error message if they attempt to contact us using too much Cyrillic: 

This stops the unwanted messages coming through, whilst helping real users understand how to contact us more appropriately, should they really need to. Thankfully we now get very little spam coming through our contact page!