Drupal Moderation and Administration related tips and tricks

5. Controlling spams, Cleaning up , Purges etc.

Drupal is best used for community websites. But if you keep community website open for users to post content or comments, you will only end up seeing loads of spam. Spam is dangerous if not cleaned since if you use Adsense account,  your account may be disabled, since spam post may violate adsense guidelines.   First you must know how to control spam, read this post  Stopping spam in Drupal – Users, Posts, Comments, Next you must know how to manage after the fact, meaning after your website has been spammed, for that check this post    5 drupal modules to Purge users, Clean-up Spammers and Spam posts

6. Flagging content - To further control Spam and take help from your forum or website members use Flag Abuse module.  provides default abuse flags for nodes, comments and users and gives an administrative interface for reviewing and resetting said flags

7. Regular Drupal housekeeping

Keeping the website free from junk and removing old and unwanted  posts is also very important.  We often get stuck because there is not bulk method to do this effectively. Even if you want to purge users or comments, we have to struggle finding the right modules to do that. Check this post for solution Deleting / Purging Cache, Users, Nodes, Comments (Housekeeping)

8. For plain simple mass deletions, without much options, check out this page

9. Backing up your website - If you are a new to drupal then you MUST take backups before making any major changes or installing major modules so that you can restore the original in case things screw up. During my early years, I myself have wasted several precious hours since I did not take the backup and had to  work several hours to restore the site. Use  Backup & Migrate module that helps making this task

10. Installing Themes and modules in the right directories

This causes issues later on, when you have to upgrade the drupal to next version . Follow the directory structure recommended, that way it will be easy to debug.

/<Your drupal-root >
  /includes
  /misc

  /modules      <-- core modules here
  /profiles
  /scripts
  /sites
    /all
      /modules  <-- contributed modules here