Testing Mollom without damaging your reputation

See also: "How do I test Mollom?"

If you test Mollom by deliberately posting spam, then you "might negatively affect the reputation associated with a particular set of credentials". Or in plain English: Mollom may decide that you are a spammer. This could cause problems for you in future when you use sites protected by Mollom - perhaps even your own site (such as this case of a trusted user being repeatedly treated as a spammer).

To avoid this, go to Home » Site manager > Edit subscription at Mollom.com, and temporarily enable 'Activate Mollom plugin developer mode' for your site which you want to test. Wait one hour.

"By doing this, API calls using this key will be treated as test calls by Mollom", according to the Mollom API documentation. In plain English, this means that spam posted to your website will not affect Mollom's opinion of the reputation of the poster.

You can force Mollom to respond as if a new comment (or other content) is spam. Just include the word 'spam' in the comment. More details below.

You must de-activate developer mode when you have finished testing, or your site will not be properly protected from spam.

From the Mollom API Documentation:

To test a Mollom plug-in during development, Mollom allows a key to be put into `developer mode'. This can be done on the Mollom website by creating a key associated with a test site. After the key is created, follow the `edit site' link for the site you just created, and enable the `developer mode' checkbox. By doing this, API calls using this key will be treated as test calls by Mollom. If an already existing site is put into developer mode, it can take as long as 60 minutes for the changes to become effective.

When in `developer mode', the checkContent method can be forced to return certain values. A specific string passed in the post body field defines what is returned. If the string spam is passed, the call will return `spam' with quality 0.0; if unsure is passed, it returns `unsure' with quality 0.5; and if ham is passed, it will return `ham' with quality 1. Mollom will also return valid session IDs that can be used for testing.
The checkCaptcha method can also be forced to return a specific response by setting the solution field. If the field is set to the string correct, the call will return true; when it is set to incorrect, false will be returned