Rules for admin notifications, Part 1: New user registrations

Rules is an especially useful Drupal module for all kinds of tasks. One use you might want to put it to is providing admin notifications of certain events on your site, e.g. user registrations and the creation of new comments and content by these “untrusted” users (assuming your use case allows them to create any content at all). I recently created such rules to help monitor the creation of users, content, and comments on drupal.cocomore.com/.de. Since we use the Project module (and supporting code) to host and track issues on some Drupal modules, we allow users to create accounts and “Issue” nodes. But there hasn’t been much recent change to the modules we host, so most of the “users” turn out to be spamming scumbags who post “issues” with links to questionable sites (you know the type). Since we allow anonymous users to comment on our blog posts, we also get our fair share of comment spam, but a tricky Captcha (we’re using Riddler, these days, to filter out visitors who don’t know or can’t take the time to search the answers to simple Drupal trivia questions) helps keep comment spam to a minimum. Keeping vigilant about stomping out spam is important since leaving spam published looks unprofessional and is bad for SEO… and since it also attracts more spam (spammers see that your site leaves spammy links in place); but of course it’s also important to keep an eye on the valid posts, too, and to respond to them in a timely fashion.

So we will assume that you have a site without a massive flow of new user registrations or new content and that you want to be alerted with some useful information whenever these events occur so that you can take appropriate action (block users and clean out the spam… or respond to valid content/comments). This article will lead you, step-by-step, through the creation of three different rules on both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 -based sites, identifying particular set-up differences between these versions of Drupal/Rules. The three events we want to create Rules for are:

1. New user registered
2. New comment posted (by non-staff user or “untrusted” user)
3. New content posted (again, by some kind of “untrusted” user)

In every case, creating a new rule starts by going to the “add rule” page:
D6: admin/rules/trigger/add
D7: admin/config/workflow/rules/reaction/add

Notify admin when a new user registers

This is a simple rule which sends an HTML email with a link to a new user’s profile, along with their username. If you allow users to register themselves on your site, you will likely notice patterns that persistent spammers follow and be alert enough to just block the most suspicious user accounts before they even start spamming your site. I won’t specify the suspicious patterns I’ve been reacting to here (I don’t want to teach spammers how to be sneakier or more effective), but if you have a spam problem, you probably already know the patterns or will quickly recognize them.