5th Comment a Spam, Mollom for Drupal 7 Enabled
Honestly I thought it would take longer that 6 days to get the first spam comment, and it was only the 5th comment, including my own two replies.
So, away to Mollom I went to create an account to be able to use its spam filter service. Downloading the Drupal 7 module from drupal.org, installing and configuring it took less than 10 minutes. Now the site is protected against spam in a very clever way.
How Mollom Works
Mollom is a an internet service founded by Dries Buytaert, who also founder both Drupal and Acquia. By installing a module on your site you get a very smart spam filtering technology.
Every time a user fills in a form, such as comment or contact form, it is, on submission, first sent to the Mollom server. If Mollom doesn't find any problems with it, it tells the website that the form submission is OK. If it is not 100% sure, then the user is presented with a CAPTCHA form to make sure it is a human and not a script filling in the form. If it on the other hand decides it is a spam, then it is blocked and wont be submitted. If it is a real user they still are able to modify their submission and try again.
Mollom - A Keen Student
What is great with the Mollom service is that it is constantly learning and improving its classification of what is spam and what is not. Not only is it doing it from the submissions on your site, but from every site that is using it.
Currently more than 20,000 websites are using it, including some very well known ones such as Sony BMG, Adobe, Warner Bros Records, Fox News, Ozzy Osborne, REM and ICANN.
With their lever of traffic, and user submissions, those sites have Mollom has to be a keen student that grows up very quickly learning what is spam or not.
Not Only Drupal
Mollom is not only available for Drupal based websitea, modules are available for other platforms as well, including Joomla and Wordpress.
Dries wants to fight spam and even though he is the founder of Drupal he doesn't want to limit such a good spam fighting technology only to it. That, in my book, earns him even more credit.
Free for Small Sites
Best of all, if you have a small site you can use the service for free. The free service is limited to 100 non spam posts and 100 correct CAPTCHA's per day. For many blog sites, such as this one, that is more than enough to start with.
Since its also so easy to administrate there is no reason to wait installing it.
Is your site spam protected yet?
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Comments
Anonymous (not verified)
Thu, 06/10/2010 - 06:07
Re: 5th Comment a Spam, Mollom for Drupal 7 Enabled
We've seen Mollom block legitimate users/comments on our sites. You?
thomas
Fri, 06/11/2010 - 19:29
Re: 5th Comment a Spam, Mollom for Drupal 7 Enabled
Not yet, but this is the first website I use it on so it is too early to tell.
Nothing can be 100% though, especially not on internet.
I believe Mollom provides a good compromise. In those cases it gets wrong, you can help improving that as well by telling their server it was a legitimate post.
Anonymous (not verified)
Fri, 12/17/2010 - 09:38
Re: 5th Comment a Spam, Mollom for Drupal 7 Enabled
First off, nice site design. Clean and simple and well thought out.
My site has just recently hit the streets as it were, and so I don't have any issues apart from one spam attempt.
I plan to add the Captcha module (I'm all D6 atm) mainly for new account registrations, and have set permission for comments with approval if a poster is anonymous. Should this be sufficient without the need for something such as the Mollom service?
thomas
Fri, 12/17/2010 - 17:10
Re: 5th Comment a Spam, Mollom for Drupal 7 Enabled
Hi,
Thanks for your kind words. I like building things that are clean, simple to use, functional, and at the same time looks good.
My experience is that it doesn't take long before comment spammers find your site. I'm also pretty sure they trade domains between them, thus your site will end up in lists and start getting hit pretty quick after that.
You approach with approving comments are good, but it will also be important that you don't wait too long before you go over the queue. Personally I don't really like ending up in a approval queue when commenting/discussing something I just read, I want my comment to be visible as soon as possible, especially if I expect to get comments on it.
You can use Mollom for much more than just comments, it works for user registrations as well. Its free service will last very long and you can always test it to see how it works for you. Its not very difficult to change it for something else later. After all it is done the Drupal way.
/thomas
belgian malinois (not verified)
Wed, 02/23/2011 - 07:00
Re: 5th Comment a Spam, Mollom for Drupal 7 Enabled
Flexible content:Define custom fields that can be used across content types, users, comments, terms and other entities. Store the data for these fields in SQL, NoSQL, or use remote storage.
Better theming:Control exactly what gets shown where on the screen with the new Render API and some truly radical alter hooks. The new RDF module provides semantic web markup.
obat asam urat (not verified)
Tue, 05/10/2011 - 07:27
Re: 5th Comment a Spam, Mollom for Drupal 7 Enabled
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