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!

However, little or nothing is available to help prevent registration spam.

Registration spam differs from comment spam as it comes through the WordPress login form, not blog comments. WordPress blogs which require registration to comment, contribute, or participate have little or no protection from spammers hammering away at their registration forms."

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The Bad Behavior 2 plugin is designed to integrate into your web site, running as early as possible to throw out spam bots before they have the opportunity to vandalize your site with their junk, or even to scrape your pages for e-mail addresses and forms to fill out. For more information on Bad Behavior, see the main Bad Behavior web site."

A recent study by WebmasterWorld found that an estimated 77% of all blogs on Google’s Blogspot service were spam. Similarly, AOL Hometown, had well over 80% of its results turn out to be spam. Even MSN Spaces, which as not mentioned in the report, is claimed to host an estimated ten percent of spammer Web site.

It seems as if nearly every major free blog hosting service has been either overrun or nearly overrun with spam. However, one services stands alone, a relative oasis of spam cleanliness, Automattic’s Wordpress.com. Despite being just as free as its competitors and placing few restrictions on registration, Wordpress.com has not endured the spam avalanche that other services have.

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"There have been some big spikes in spam lately, and yesterday was the first day we processed more than 3 million comments. The spam has been coming in hard and fast, according to Six Apart’s status blog it was even the cause of Typepad downtime this morning."

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A few months ago, I posted that I use Akismet in both Drupal and Wordpress. Akismet is a spam filtering service that can be used in content management systems via plug-ins and modules. The Akismet plugin ships with Wordpress 2, but some setup is required.

While visiting my Wordpress site I noticed the specific number of comment spams the Akismet filter had caught so far and made sure I took a screenshot. The image below was taken by me and I assure you that no altering of the photo was done. I'll let you be the judge whether you agree that spam through site comments represent the evil the number shown implies.

I do use Akismet to filter out the spam that is posted through comments here at CMS Report. As most of you know by now, my content mangement system of choice for this site is Drupal. The Akismet module for Drupal is now at version 1.1.2 and available at phpMiX.org (Open Source experiments).

"PunBB is cool forum software, which is now even cooler that it has spam protection.

Per Soderlind has written an Akismet spam protection mod for PunBB. Per said:

Thank you for making Akismet, I finally got rid of spam from my forum.

I’ve added it to our development page, which now features 24 different application and language implementations of Akismet."

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"SLV (Spam Link Verification) is a service run by Russ Jones at www.linksleeve.org. The idea is that interactive sites like Geeklog or forums send all user-contributed posts to SLV first which then checks if certain links show up in unusually high amounts. In which case it considers those to be spam and flags them accordingly.

The SLV module for Geeklog's Spam-X plugin makes use of that service. See the included README for installation instructions."

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"This will probably be the last spam milestone we blog for a while, but a few hours ago Akismet passed 100,000,000 spams blocked. Whoa.

When we hit one million spams blocked I talked about how much time Akismet has saved its users if you made the assumption of 1 second per spam that Akismet caught and you never had to see. Going by that same formula, Akismet has now saved folks 27,777 hours or about 3.2 years of consectutive 24-hour days.

This of course doesn't include time saved by regular commenters not having to deal with difficult-to-read CAPTCHA images, boil-the-ocean authentication schemes, or complicated confirmation systems."