spam filter

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.

I 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.

Lots of news this week regarding the open source SilverStripe CMS.  It is extremely unusual for CMS Report to post something on SilverStripe as well as something on comment spam twice in one week.  Yet, my two favorite companies, Silverstripe Ltd and Mollom, are going to have me do just that because of today's announcement that they've partnered together to help SilverStripe site owners block comment spam on their sites.

SilverStripe and Mollom worked together on improving the code in the official vendor-supported Mollom module which is compatible with SilverStripe 2.3.1 and greater.  Dries Buytaert, a Mollom co-founder, wrote about this new partnership to improve the module's code.

We [Mollom] have been working with Sigurd Magnusson and others at SilverStripe Limited to meet technical and commercial requirements of being a partner, and have been pleased at how easy this has been. SilverStripe's CMS also looks to have a bright future: while young, it now has over 150,000 downloads to date, a great user interface and underlying architecture, and last year won Packtpub's most promising open source CMS award. Therefore, our partnership with SilverStripe certainly meets our goals, and we're happy to have them on board to help the Mollom ecosystem grow.

The folks over at SilverStripe appear pleased with how well Mollom blocks spam. Sigurd Magnusson writes about SilverStripe's own experience with Mollom.

Mollom has proven to be very effective on SilverStripe.com and SilverStripe.org. Together, those two sites have had more than 400,000 spam attempts in the past 6 weeks. Only about one in 10,000 spam appear to be getting through; we'd be overwhelmed with spam otherwise! The effectiveness of Mollom is largely due to Benjamin Schrauwen, a co-founder of Mollom who is responsible for its machine-learning capability. This capability means that as more people use (and abuse!) Mollom, the more it learns good from bad, and its ability to block inappropriate material improves.

Below the fold, you'll also find a video demonstrating how Mollom can be used to protect SilverStripe blogs, forums, and forms against spam.

I'm doing a little morning reading at some of my favorite Internet spots.  A couple of this morning's IT related posts that caught my attention:

• Rich Hoeg (eContent) has created a very nice tutorial/screencast on Google's SearchWiki.  Personally, I can't decide if this is a good move for Google or not.  It seems to me the biggest benefit of Google is that you go there, do a search, find the link you want, and get out.  Internet junkies like me already are too distracted with places like Digg.com that I like Google's single purpose pages.  When I'm on a search mission, I don't need the collateral damage.
• Dries Buytaert explains the weaknesses of serving your own CAPTCHA to fight spam and the benefits of Mollom hosting CAPTCHAs for you.  He also discusses the dirty business of comment spam where services will leave comment spam at sites like yours and mine for a fee.  As I commented on Dries blog, comment spam makes this world a scary place for website owners. I'm glad we have Mollom!

Dries Buytaert, Drupal's project leader, has just unveiled his latest Drupal project...Mollom. Mollom's goal is to be an automated content monitoring system with one of its initial services geared toward providing a spam filter and CAPTCHA server for websites.

Dries Buytaert: Mollom, my content monitoring startup -

After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

CMSReport.com is one in a number of Drupal sites that have been "secretly" testing Mollom over the past several months. Since installing Mollom, I've been able to sleep at night knowing that Mollom is watching over my site. The amount of time I spend on moderating anonymous comments for potential spam has been significantly reduced thanks to Mollom. This is good stuff from Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen!