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interview

Mollom: A solution for comment spam

Bryan's picture
By Bryan - Posted on 23 November 2009

Passwords, user accounts, email verification. I have never liked requiring my website's visitors to register before they can leave a comment. There is a large segment of people that like to submit quality comments online, but they don't want to be required to leave their personal information there. So from the beginning, I have always allowed anonymous commenting by unregistered visitors and for the most party, they quality of the comments haven't suffered. However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom.

Mollom LogoI was first introduced to Mollom in the Fall of 2007 as a beta tester. Prior to Mollom, I had been using a number of techniques, modules, and services with limited success in blocking unwanted spam. While some of these filtering methods did help me filter out unwanted content, I was still spending quite a bit of my time moderating the comments for potential spam. Worse, in long absences from the site I had to disable anonymous commenting for fear that I would come back to a site riddled with ads for the latest popular pharmaceutical drugs or some girl that wanted to be seen for a price. That's when Mollom entered the picture and helped stop most of the spam from entering my site.

In the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site. Since, the current statistics provided by Mollom only date back to early 2008, the official number of spam blocked stands at around 77,000. In other words, I receive an average of 120 comments a day that require no moderation on my part.

Discovering Mixergy with Magento

Bryan's picture
By Bryan - Posted on 26 June 2009

Not sure if I'm early or late to the party, but I just discovered Mixergy.com. Mixergy is a place where 20ish Andrew Warner wants to help ambitious people who love business as much as he does to learn from a mix of experienced mentors. Somebody on the Internet wanting to help you make money, imagine that.

However Mixergy has something that many sites don't have...fantastic interviews of some very influential Web people. Some of the videos that caught my attention included interviews of Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, and most recently, Roy Rubin of Magento. I recommend checking Mixergy.com out.

The biggest independent record label in the world use eZ Publish

thomas's picture
By thomas - Posted on 26 June 2008

EMI Music is the biggest independent record label in the world. EMI Music represents 1,000 artists from all musical genres in 50 countries. One of its focuses is to develop and promote digital services via the Web, mobile channels, and TV throughout the world, providing fans with a rich, complete musical experience.

We have interviewed them and asked about their approach to eZ Publish, new media and content management.

How has the internet transformed EMI's approach?

In order to address evolving consumer needs, EMI Music France has intensified its marketing strategy and promotional activities on the internet. It is a fast and highly competitive industry where responsiveness is crucial for developing and sustaining market share. It is essential that we have dynamic content and an engaging Web presence.

What sort of content management solutions have you implemented? What have been the challenges and difficulties?

EMI Music France has implemented a content management platform that has allowed us to standardize our site development and maintenance process – including artist, record label and event websites. A major technical challenge was to integrate dynamic, interactive Flash elements with other content. We also needed a Web 2.0 capable content management platform that could handle RSS importing and exporting across multiple sites, manage widgets, handle multiple video formats, and so on. The overall goal of the platform is to be able to quickly deploy and easily manage quality sites that can evolve over time.

In which projects have you used eZ Publish?

We use eZ Publish as part of the platform on all of our promotional, artist, and label sites. Developed by SMILE according to our technical requirements, our platform has served as the starting point for approximately fifty live websites, including http://www.etiennedaho.com and http://www.ilovem83.com.