Appeal!: Explain what a user should do if "Your submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted."

Thanks for reporting this, Randy. You can be sure that this is a top priority for Mollom. Some feature enhancements closely related to this suggestion are actively discussed and developed currently.

However, please understand that this is quite a complex problem space, as spammers can (and will) eventually abuse any possibility that allows end-users to report an invalid filter decision. The issue would likely get worse if end-users were able to report and take additional steps, but the data that Mollom gets wouldn't be usable due to abuse, so it reasonably couldn't do anything about it, and thus, end-users would be annoyed even more, because they "even did the additional steps, but still nothing changed."

I'm still trying wrap my head around the whole scenario, brainstorming ideas that may lead to less abuse. It's possible that I'll use this very issue to implement the improvement we come up with though.

Isn't entering the captcha enough? I've been getting this message frequently on mollom enabled sites.

I've just recently found out that if I don't enter my homepage then the comment goes through? My homepage domain isn't live due to maintenance. Is that why or is my domain flagged or something? My last attempt was at 2bits - http://2bits.com/drupal-performance/reducing-size-and-io-load-apaches-we.... Where I used this info:

Your name: Dale Dude
E-mail: me@gmail.com (fake name, real provider)
Homepage: http://www.daledude.com
Subject left blank
Comment: Turn BufferedLogs on as well.

Subscribing. This happened to a user on my mollom-enabled site today as well, this is how I came across this thread.

Is it safe to post the Mollom session-id here -- if that can help to track down the problem.

I think a great fix would be a feature to disable mollom's refusal of a form that passed the captcha. I once tried typing a comment with mention of viagra into my site, and after passing the captcha mollom blocked me and it became impossible for me to post anything (apparently my IP was blocked). I had to reconnect to change my IP before being able to post on my site again.

Considering that a simple CAPTCHA gets rid of about 99.9% of spam on my site (mollom gets rid of 100% plus half of my legitimate posts), it really begs the question whether mollom's nazi filtering is the right way to go...

It would be nice, at the very least, to make the message that's displayed be configurable, with support for tokens. Support for rules would also be nice so that we could build our own custom workflows when content is flagged as spam.

What ever happened to the text analysis and CAPTCHA! Why was this removed. I think it was a great fall back that would eliminate this issue here. If the text analysis fails then the user is presented with a CAPTCHA.

My experience as a user, @sun, is still this: If you put a link in a form on a site protected by mollom, you will be summarily excluded. So 1) I don't use mollom on any site I have anything to do with because of the extremely negative impact on visitors and 2) If I place a comment on a site that has mollom on it, I just don't put a link in.

Mollom boasts about how many spams it's blocked, but still has never dealt with or built a way to deal with false positives, which means it has no idea how many spams it has blocked, just how many posts it has blocked. Mollom thinks "If I block it, it must be spam". Which I think is a problem :-)

It would be great if Mollom's reaction could be modified and people who have just posted a thorough response to an article and get the "your response has triggered the spam filter" could have a way to either report it to the site or report it to mollom, so mollom could at least get some kind of handle on these false positives. Since I can personally get about 80% false positive just by including a link on a mollom-protected site, I think it could be a good exercise.

One of my clients got a wave of registrations and lots of them couldn't register because of Mollom - now she has a really bad impression of it, and I'm probably going to have to swap it out for Akismet + Antispam or something similar.

After all this time, a false positive (not uncommon at all) still is non-negotiable with Mollom, preventing valuable feedback for site owners and community members, and frustrating an unknown (and uncounted) number of end users.

Couldn't we have an "appeal this judgment" link? That way the end user could say something about why it shouid be approved.

In my test it is the same problem with 6-x-1.6 or 7-x-1.1. I did manage to post a comment when logged in. Settings are to allow comments when Mollom servers are unreacahble. I have never seen a Captcha form, and almost never been able to leave a comment.

So where is the problem? There is a long thread http://randyfay.com/node/69 about mollom false positives, on post about false negatives. It seems clear that the problem is with the Mollom service, not with the module. Is this because I am running low traffic sites where non-spam comments are rare? Maybe Mollom learns to reject almost every comment on my sites? In case anyone from Mollom is looking, my latest failed comment had session_id = '1108209fa4108e0960'. On Drupal 6 I have switched to Trick Question module, on Drupal 7 to Honeypot module.

I have the problem a lot. I use mobile broadband with dynamically assigned IPs which change very often (sometimes even 'spin' without disconnecting! you know it happens when you are kicked out of online banking or cPanel for no apparent reason, cPanel returns 'your IP address has changed'). Maybe mobile broadband IPs should be whitelisted?

@ebeyrent: It's the same as using http://mollom.com/contact - sorry for the confusion.

PS: Thank god d.o doesn't use mollom!

Is it true that drupal.org does not use Mollom?

But I don't agree that it is a bug with the module since the problem seems to be stemming from Mollom's own servers rather than the module.

There was no followup to the session ID I provided for a false positive, though sun was kind enough to say thanks for it. It is very depressing as a loyal and enthusiastic Drupalista to have to face the fact that (for my purposes at least, and quite a few others) Mollom is broke. Although complaints of false positives have been around on the web for some time (eg a comment on Dries' own blog http://buytaert.net/mollom-2010-retrospective) there are few signs that it is going to be fixed. I have been using Honeypot module with good success to block spam on low traffic Drupal sites.

I guess the default setting can be altered to accept suspicious comments. Dries did that oh his blog you referred to. I tried to comment on that post days ago and was blocked. now I get into approval queue

Given that many people have had problems, and there is no clear statement from Mollom that things have changed, I personally would not use it. I use Honeypot for anti-spam. For for a large busy site, it is not clear whether Honeypot would be enough, and a more sophisticated solution such as Mollom may be needed. I am guessing that for big corporate customers, who are paying for Mollom, it must be working fine. But for small users of the free service, it seems best avoided on the basis of my experience.

I still find it amazing that the Mollom service allows the false positives it does. I think if site owners were aware of how many frustrated users try to post comments they'd all cease to use it. It seems that the people who run the service just don't understand what happens to real people (like me) out there.

Here's a concrete example. I just posted a very simple comment, with no links at all, and got rejected (with no appeal possible, of course):