Mollom, my content monitoring startup

By Dries on 1 Apr 2008 at 06:56 UTC

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.

If you're interested in learning more about how Mollom works, check out the 'How Mollom works' page and visit the Mollom FAQs for more details.

We currently provide modules for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. For all you developers out there who'd like to build Mollom plug-ins, we will be releasing full API documentation very soon. We would be thrilled to put your home-brew plug-in for your favorite platform on our download page.

Mollom vs Akismet vs Defensio?

Mollom does offer some of the same features as Akismet or Defensio, but our goal goes further than spam-blocking alone. We want to increase the overall quality of your site's content. For example, Mollom's CAPTCHA service already helps block fake user accounts, and we are experimenting with various automated content-quality assessments, including blocking obscene, violent and profane content.

We have some great new features in the pipeline, so please check back with us regularly for more news or subscribe to Mollom's RSS feed.

Mollom and Acquia?

Mollom is a self-funded, garage-style project. I do take it very seriously, but it is nowhere near the size or scope of Acquia, which obviously remains my full-time commitment.

Mollom is a separate effort for three reasons: (i) I started it a while ago, (ii) I'm working on it with a friend who is not involved with Drupal or Acquia and (iii) unlike Acquia, Mollom is reaching out to as many content management systems and web applications as we can engage (and not just Drupal).

While Mollom is not associated corporately with Acquia, Acquia does intend to offer Mollom services as part of its subscription offerings. See Acquia's Caliper project.

Thank you to our testers

We would like to thank all of our private beta testers for their help and suggestions over the past months -- you've gotten us to this important milestone, guys. Thank you!

Comments

I've put mollom in my blog

Carlitus commented 1 April 2008 at 16:04

I'm already testing it in my personal blog (in spanish, sorry)

Web design Neurotic

Omtisis Consulting

Can it be used in French or

coming commented 1 April 2008 at 21:55

Can it be used in French or Chinese enviroment?

I don't know but almost all

Carlitus commented 2 April 2008 at 07:45

I don't know but almost all the spam is in english, isn't it?

Web design Neurotic

Omtisis Consulting

And the world ends at the edge of the map.

Antoine Lafontaine commented 6 April 2008 at 14:13

I do not want to burst your bubble, but you can get spammed in all the flavors of the rainbow.

And a question for Dries and all the people who did use/are using Mollom:
To what extent is Mollom based on the language contained in the monitored content? Can it handle content in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Arabic languages and so on. Can it be trained to handle those contents (I remember reading a passage that sounded like "intelligent text-analysis filter").

Reviews...

JohnForsythe commented 2 April 2008 at 01:29

So, who will be first to give it a rating?

PS: Very smart move buying mollum.com, it's an easy typo to make.

--
John Forsythe
Drupal Modules - Find the module you need for your project!

Is it reliable enough to

FiReaNGeL commented 1 April 2008 at 17:00

Is it reliable enough to allow anonymous comments on a site? I'm definitively considering this, but wouldn't human be able to 'spam' the system anyway (not with spam, but with stupid comments, junk words such as 'akjsdkasjdkashjdka', etc?). What about links that lead to questionable content, but from a non-obvious spam domain (i.e not i-sell-viagra.com)? Something like "a href='a-questionable-page-from-a-good-domain'>Check this out!<"

Anyway I can't wait to test / try this, it sounds better than Akismet (never tried Defensio).

---
Biology Articles

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e! Science News

It is.

sirkitree commented 1 April 2008 at 17:22

I've been beta testing Mollom for months now and it works like a charm for just that.

You can also protect your registration form and won't have to keep such a close eye on registrations now either!

_{~Professional: Lullabot

~Personal: jeradbitner.com}

Trackbacks?

greenmachine commented 1 April 2008 at 17:08

Does it filter trackbacks? In my experience that is the weakest part of the Drupal spam/captcha codebase. Existing modules are already fairly effective at reducing spam users/nodes/comments.

Trackbacks are currently not

Dries commented 1 April 2008 at 18:50

Trackbacks are currently not supported by Mollom. IIRC, the last time that I looked at the trackback module, it didn't sport an API/hook for other modules to filter incoming trackbacks (i.e. it was technically not possible to integrate Mollom). This might have changed recently. If not, we should talk to the trackback module maintainers. ;-)

Please do!

Freso commented 8 April 2008 at 20:29

Mollom has made me drop trying to make the Akismet module behave, so now I need to have Mollom play nice with Trackback instead. +1 for you to talk with the trackback.module maintainer(s)! :)

--
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen

hook_trackback

Freso commented 11 April 2008 at 09:15

And I've just been told that there already is a way to plug into Trackback: hook_trackback.

--
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen

Patch!

Freso commented 22 June 2008 at 15:14

And now I've actually made a patch to integrate Trackback checking into Mollom: #245364: Provide API to programmatically validate content (integration with Trackback module)

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. :)

--
Frederik 'Freso' S. Olesen

April Fools!

RobLoach

he/him

commented 1 April 2008 at 18:54

This is a horrible April Fools joke. You can do better, Dries! :-)

Of course you realize that it isn't a joke...

robertDouglass commented 1 April 2008 at 20:45

... right?

- Robert Douglass

-----
my Drupal book

Huh?

ggevalt commented 1 April 2008 at 20:54

I'm hoping, Rob, that your comment is an April Fool's joke.
And I am presuming Mollom is real...seems an extensive amount of work for a joke.

geoff gevalt
http://www.youngwritersproject.org

geoff gevalt
http://www.youngwritersproject.org
http://www.ywpschools.net
http://geoffreygevalt.com

Looks very interesting. I

Helpermedia commented 1 April 2008 at 21:08

Looks very interesting. I also like the fact that you're using green hosting.

Red Nose Day

eigentor commented 1 April 2008 at 23:43

The way you start your post lends itself indeed to push the belief in an april fools joke...
"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."
Sounds too good to be true...

Maybe a missed opportunity ;) You could have taken us all in and promising self-patching and self-testing code that will clean your windows system of viruses and chase your mother-in-law off by hypersonic waves ... Apart from adding a 25th hour to the day in which all maintainers will keep their issue queue clean.

Seriously, it sounds great. Looking forward to hear more of it.

I'm happy being miserable

Remind me

robertDouglass commented 2 April 2008 at 16:16

never to launch a real company on April 1. There are some really big sites that you've heard of running Mollom and it's working really well for them. It lives up to its promises.

- Robert Douglass

-----
my Drupal book

Apple started on April 1...

jstoller

he/him

commented 3 April 2008 at 04:56

...and they seem to be doing ok. ;-)
––
Jeremy Stoller
Senior Graphic Artist
California Science Center

––
Jeremy Stoller
Senior Graphic Artist
California Science Center

Guess Who

xentek commented 18 April 2008 at 19:52

Apple Did. They seem to be doing alright.

Eric Marden

This sounds fantastic Dries,

ipwa commented 2 April 2008 at 16:34

This sounds fantastic Dries, thanks so much. Downloading now, can't wait to start trying out, cheers!

Nicolas
-------------------------
http://nic.ipwa.net

Nicolas
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User acceptance?

dshaw commented 4 April 2008 at 01:13

Sounds like a real time saver. However, the Mollom service agreement requires a website visitor's "name or nickname, IP address, membership ID, OpenID, website URL and e-mail address" to be passed on. As Mollom is a third party, I would need to seek permission from all my members, or at least those that post content, before introducing Mollom. I would expect there to be some objection to this.

What have others found? Are users prepared to pass on this information in return for a SPAM-free website?

while i want to love mollom

allen074 commented 8 May 2008 at 00:11

while i want to love mollom - as i noted in a thread on your forum, im not sure this is ready for primetime - every single comment on my site has been flagged as spam and my readers are pissed. I've tried about 30 comments myself and every single one is spam. posts on your site when i am logged in also tell me i am a spammer. i sure hope this will get some sort of reply - i will be forced to sadly remove mollom this weekend if there is no progress.