Sometimes I get too nostalgic over computers or software that I once used in my daily life. I remember my first computer (the Commodore Vic-20), I remember my first programming language (BASIC), and I remember my first spam filtering software for user generated content (Akismet). But nine years ago, a new spam filtering service originally intended for Drupal called Mollom emerged and I quickly forgot about the other spam blocking software.
Yesterday, Dries Buytaert announced on his blog that Acquia has released the next generation of Mollom, the Mollom Content Moderation Platform. The new Mollom platform is being billed by Acquia as the "first cloud content moderation platform built for the enterprise". Mollom is capable of reducing the time that’s required to moderate large volumes of user-generated content. Personally having used Mollom to assist me in moderating user content for small to medium sites, I would think the need for something like Mollom is even greater for enterprises with an even larger web presence.
Like most website administrators, I have a long history of fighting spammers and protecting my sites from unwanted content. Over the years I've used a lot of tools and services to block spam from reaching the pages of my sites. In recent years, the service I've relied on most heavily is Mollom. Mollom is a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop spam on your blog, social network or community website
Overall I've been very happy with the spam filterering Mollom provides for my sites. 
However, occasionally Mollom can be too aggressive and remove legitimate story and comment submissions. And when I say "remove" I most definately intend to use the word in the literal way. You see, up to now, Mollom had an "all or none" approach to rejecting or accepting spam. When your stories or comments were rejected, the content submission was simply discarded without review by a human.
If you've ever submitted good clean content to CMSReport.com or another site only to only have it identified and discarded as spam, you have every right to be upset with spam filters. Over the past couple months, I've had a number of people upset that the spam filtering CMS Report has been using rejected their story submission. This may not be all the fault of Mollom either as I was also using the Bad Behavior module too. My apologies to everyone that has gone through this experience when they've submitted legitimate comments and stories to this site. Unfortunately, without spam filtering the content on this site would not be good to view. Spam filtering is a necessary part of maintaining a site open to the public.
Luckily, there has been some improvements in the Mollom for Drupal module that should keep your posts and comments from getting discarded while continuing to protect this site from spam. The module has now been improved to to retain spam comments as unpublished posts in a site's moderation queue. So we're giving the new module a try. I won't promise that your content will not be identified as spam, but I do promise you that every intent is being made to review your comments and stories for publication.
After two years of spam protection by Mollom people are beginning to proudly show off their ham/spam stats. Davy Van Den Bremt over at Drupal coder writes:
If you're happy about Mollom, just shout it out on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, ... by putting up a screenshot of your stats and saying how many spam has been caught by Mollom. You can find the stats of your site on your Mollom account. If you're using Drupal, you can find them under Administer > Reports > Mollom Statistics.
If you're using Twitter, use the hashtag #mollomstats. I'm looking forward see how much crap content Mollom has spared us from.
The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that's the subject matter that our readers want to read.
Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking.
The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I'll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I've said before, I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.
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 part, 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.
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.
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!
