Talking Drupal #505 - Custom Field Module

Today we are talking about the Custom Field Module, what it does,
and why you might want to use it with guest Andy Marquis. We’ll
also cover Facet Bot Blocker as our module of the week.


For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/505
Topics

Meet the Guest: Andy Marquee

Module of the Week: Facet Bot Blocker

Exploring the Custom Field Module

Benefits and Use Cases of Custom Field Module

Custom Field Module vs. Other Solutions

Advanced Features and Integrations

Reflecting on Past Projects and Key Value

Use Cases and Flexibility of Custom Fields

Advanced Features and Integrations

Challenges and Limitations

Future Roadmap and Improvements

Resources

Custom Field Module
Guests

Andy Marquis - drupal.org/project/custom_field apmsooner
Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Norah Medlin - tekNorah
MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu


Brief description:

Have you been looking for an inexpensive way to mitigate
an upsurge of bot traffic on your Drupal site’s faceted
search pages? There’s a module for that



Module name/project name:

Facet Bot Blocker



Brief history

How old: created in Mar 2025, so about two months ago, by
John Brandenburg (bburg) of Forum One

Versions available: 1.0.2 which support Drupal 10 and 11



Maintainership

Actively maintained

Security coverage

Number of open issues: 4 open issues, one of which is a
bug, but it did have a fix merged 4 days ago



Usage stats:

106 sites



Module features and usage

A number of sites are seeing a huge upswing in bot
traffic, and quite often a big part of that bot traffic is on
one or more pages with faceted search

Crawlers try to request every permutation of every
possible combination of facets. If your page has multiple
facets, and in particular facets that accept multiple values,
the number of permutations becomes huge

Facet Bot Blocker works by allowing you to set a maximum
number of facet requests to allow, what error to return, and
a custom HTML message to return to blocked user agents

If you have Memcache or Redis available, it’s recommended
to use the appropriate module, and Facet Bot Blocker will
automatically store its settings there for reduced database
reads

The project page is also clear that if you are able to
use a true Web Application Firewall (like Cloudflare or
Akamai), that would be a better strategy. But if you don’t
have one available, Facet Bot Blocker can help to mitigate
the surges in bot traffic that are causing problems for many
Drupal sites, particularly those hosted on platforms that
charge based on usage