Hurley's World

I can't remember exactly how long I've been using Mollom to control spam on my website, but I'm guessing it was pretty soon after they released the product. For those who don't know, Mollom was found in 2008 by two friends who met while they were university students. One of the founders is Dries Buytaert, founder and product lead of Drupal, and the other is Benjamin Schrauwen, a machine learning expert. As stated on their about page, they program in Java and PHP on Apple computers and pay for green hosting.

In many ways, Mollom is similar to the relatively well-known service Akismet. Both services analyze content posted to web sites and attempt to filter out posts that might be classified as spam. The reason I prefer Mollom to Akismet is two-fold. First, they are more flexible. Mollom can be set to use captcha as a backup method (including an audio version) and to protect user registration forms in addition to content posts and comments. Also, while a number of sites use the free version of Akismet for commercial sites anyway, technically that is not allowed. Mollom only asks users to pay once they reach a particular threshold, in this case 100 non-spam requests per day.

Mollom offers 3 service levels. The free level allows 100 legitimate posts per day and is aimed at personal blogs, small community websites, and non-profits. The middle level costs 30 euros per month per site, allows 1000 legitimate posts per day and is aimed at corporate websites and professional blogs. The highest level costs 3,600 euros per year per site, allows 10,000 legitimate posts per day, and is aimed at large community and Fortune 5000 sites. All levels of service are allowed an unlimited number of spam posts per day. Besides Drupal, Mollom provides plugins for Wordpress, Joomla!, Radiant, SilverStripe, and StatusNet and has developer libraries in Java, PHP5, Ruby, Python, Perl, ColdFusion, .NET, Zend Framework and IIS/ASP.

Overall, I've found Mollom really easy to install and use. I definitely recommend them to any site I work on and it's one of the first module requests I make when I take over a new Drupal site. I remember the days of wading through hundreds of spam comments to find the few legitimate ones and, for a while now, I haven't had to do that at all. Lots more information can be found on their website, http://www.mollom.com and you can keep up with new developments through their blog or by following them on Twitter, @mollom.