First Spam that Mollom didn't catch
Today I got the first spam that Mollom didn't manage to catch. I'm not really surprised though since I am pretty sure it was not done by a spam bot. The reason I am saying pretty sure is that my site was hit big by spam bots today and even though I have set the log to keep the last 10,000 entires the number of new spam attempts filled it before I had a chance to look at it.
The content of it was:
This is interesting [link to a site]
When I looked at it, the email address was a .ru and of course the link was totally unrelated. Thus deleting and reporting it to Mollom was the only choice.
Mollom Statistics
I then took a look at my Mollom statistics, see the screenshot below:
Note that it only shows statistics up to December 13, so the spam attempts today is not visible there yet.
So, having just one spam trickling through with almost 1,100 blocked is really good and shows how well it is working.
There have been some feedback from users who has said they have had some problems posting due to Mollom though. I know for a fact that at one time when that happened it was when the Mollom server when through a major upgrade. I asked that reader to resubmit his post and that time it worked just fine.
Finding the Balance
The problem we face with allowing users to comment or in other ways interact with a website is to find the right balance using tools such as Mollom. If the tools are to strict then visitors will avoid interacting with your site. If it is the other way you risk ending up with a lot of spam and other junk content that both takes a lot of work to get rid of and risk penalising your site in in the search engine rankings.
My experience with Mollom is that used right it gives a good balance. It catches almost all spam attempts, as well as protect user registration from bots. For a site owner it saves a lot of time, time that instead can be spent on much better things.
It would be interesting to know what tools do you use on your site to prevent spam and unwanted bot users. Feel free to use the comments below to let us know your experiences.
- Log in to post comments
Comments
Andy C (not verified)
Sat, 12/18/2010 - 15:48
Re: First Spam that Mollom didn't catch
I've recently migrated my blog to Drupal 7 and, although I use Disqus for comments which uses Akismet for spam, I do use Mollom to protect the Contact and the user registration forms. I noticed I was getting a lot of spam attempts on the user registration form so I simply removed it from the Navigation menu which helped a lot. Generally, Mollom seems to do a pretty good job.
thomas
Sat, 12/18/2010 - 16:47
Re: First Spam that Mollom didn't catch
Hi Andy,
I'm not surprised you got a lot of spam attempts on the user registration form. Getting a registered user is like striking gold for a spammer since most sites don't use spam protection for authorised users.
/thomas
Billy (not verified)
Sat, 12/18/2010 - 23:02
Re: First Spam that Mollom caught
Get drugs online for CHEAPER and MORE DISCREET. Shipped from our warehouses to your door TODAY. Tasty delicious spam NOW ONLY GET IT NOW! http://SPAM.org
thomas
Sun, 12/19/2010 - 02:03
Re: First Spam that Mollom caught
I'm going to leave this comment as it is.
Reason is that it is actually not a spam, it is a real comment by someone that tries to push the limit trying to pretend he/she is a spammer.
It's actually quite fun,
Anonymous (not verified)
Sun, 12/19/2010 - 14:58
Re: First Spam that Mollom didn't catch
I'll definitely give mollom a try. Thanks for sharing.
Hire PHP Developers (not verified)
Wed, 08/03/2011 - 07:42
Re: First Spam that Mollom didn't catch
Hey when i feel that about mallom that is not the first time it has happened I am afraid :-( Falling back to just captcha for now - but you are right there is an issue to be dealt there with Mollom.
Joe Van Steen (not verified)
Wed, 10/26/2011 - 22:47
Re: First Spam that Mollom didn't catch
I'm still in development on my Drupal site, but I have a blog up on Wordpress.com. For the blog, I'm using akismet for spam blocking. The following are some of the "comments" (less the links) that have been posted to my site by spammers, ALL of which were caught by akismet and blocked. Pretty amazing I thought. I'd be curious to know how Mollum might have handled these same posts based on your experience. Have you looked through at any of the stuff that was caught and stopped?
"Found this site on google, very glad I did."
"thank for taking the time to discuss this, I feel strongly about it and love learning more on this topic. If possible, as you gain expertise, could you mind updating your site with more info? as it is extremely helpful for me."
"Spot on with this write-up, I truly think this website needs much more consideration. I’ll probably be again to read much more, thanks for that info."
"I think youve made some actually interesting points. Not as well many people would really think about this the way you just did. Im definitely impressed that theres so very much about this topic thats been uncovered and you did it so well, with so very much class. Great 1 you, man! Really good stuff here."
"Spot on with this write-up, I truly think this website needs much more consideration. I’ll probably be again to read much more, thanks for that info."
All of these appear on the surface to be complimentary comments, but all were also placed on my site with an attempt to get links back to the poster's site. In all cases the poster was a spammer running a site for either porn, "enhancement" products, or other such schemes. It seems like sites that are tangentially valid are getting through, but these are all getting caught. I don't have a lot of volume, but I also haven't had the site up for very long. The only real case where a form of spam got through that I've had to flag on my own was a case where someone hi-jacked one of my own posts with self-referenced links and posted my page on their site.
Does anyone have an opinion of Akismet versus Mollum on Drupal sites?