I wish there was a third alternative in the "When Mollom is down or unreachable" settings: to have it fall back on using a CAPTCHA for all submissions.

Blocking all submissions isn't really an acceptable option on any form that's at all important - for example, one client of mine who's currently having problems with Mollom is a psychotherapy referral service, and they really don't want people who be in crisis and need help to be deterred from seeking it by not being able to get through.

But leaving it on "accept all" means that if the Mollom servers aren't reachable, as was apparently the case for a big chunk of today and part of yesterday, then they get hammered with spam.

It seems like it would be much more sensible to have the default behaviour in the event of not being able to reach Mollom to do the text analysis be to use a CAPTCHA. Would this be possible to add to some future version of the module? Or would it be considered too much of a disincentive for people to sign up for paid accounts?

Comments

sun’s picture

sun
Primary language German
Location Karlsruhe
commented
Category: feature » support
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

The CAPTCHAs are also delivered by the Mollom service and not generated or processed locally. Mollom CAPTCHAs are more advanced than other CAPTCHAs on the net; they take additional meta data into account (similar to Mollom's text analysis).

The Drupal module actually contains the client-side integration code only. It does not contain any kind of logic that would attempt to classify or filter spam manually - that's the job of the Mollom service, which not only uses highly advanced methods for classifying content in many complex ways, but also takes the data of all other sites in the Mollom network into account.

Therefore, this is not on the roadmap in the foreseeable future. However, the communication/networking issues you mentioned should be resolved by now.

hawkdrupal’s picture

hawkdrupal commented
Version: 6.x-1.16 » 7.x-2.0

We had to shut down Mollom as too unreliable. Due to its server usually being UNavailable, it would provide one CAPTCHA out of ten form hits.

Using either Mollom "server unavailable" mode was a non-solution. Either we could block 90% of form submissions (therefore blocking some real users) or we could allow everything through (massive spam).

Mollom's text analysis mode did virtually nothing, letting just about everything through.

The paid version of Mollom claims to be "much better" but Mollom's non-actions speak louder than words.

We're back to the long-reliable CAPTCHA module plus BOTCHA.

mbahlol’s picture

mbahlol commented

@hawkdrupal thanks for the info about botcha. because I've tried recaptcha but still delete spam. still looking for the best solution.