Mollom
Ten million spam attempts blocked
Last weekend, Mollom blocked the ten millionth spam attempt. That is ten million tiny contributions to making the web a nicer place. We've been growing pretty fast. Drupal is still the main platform for users with Mollom subscriptions, with Joomla! coming second, and Wordpress third. Milestone weekend!
Mollom launch coverage
It is now five days after Mollom came out of beta and some of the dust has settled, so I figured I'd give you an update on what people wrote. Here is a selected subset of some of the coverage we got:
- Peter Hagopian at InformationWeek: Mollom Comment Spam Solution Emerges From Beta. Mollom is currently supported by Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, as well as the recent additions Radiant (a CMS built on the Ruby On Rails framework) and DaliCMS. Mollom seems to be getting better and better and it's nice to see it come out of beta.
- Mikkel Høgh: My six months with Mollom. Before Mollom, I’ve been using spam.module and Akismet with varying degrees of success, and when Mollom first came out, I wondered why we needed another Akismet, but decided to try it out to support Dries. The answer to that question is that Mollom is in fact not just another Akismet. Spam blocking is just one of the things it does. That does not mean that Mollom is not good at blocking spam. My experience is that Mollom is more effective than Akismet and spam.module combined.
- Growing Venture Solutions: Mollom - Out of Beta and Ready to Eat Your Spam (without bothering your normal visitors). The service is now out of Beta and available to large sites that need redundancy and volume analysis for 30 euros/month. That seems like a great deal and they've even got a better deal: most sites with limited needs who are willing to accept occasional server downtime can still get the service for free. Wonderful news.
- Jan Polzer at Maxiorel: Mollom: komentářový antispam a zkušenosti z praxe. (Czech article)
- Justin Miller at Code Sorcery: Mollom anti-spam service is out of beta. I've been using Mollom for a few months and have been very happy with it. If you run a blog, even one that isn't in Drupal, I would encourage you to check it out. It's free for many uses, so you lose nothing by at least giving it a shot.
- Josiah Ritchie: Mollom - The Bullet Proof Vest. All this means, the content on the site is pure, not diluted by the evils of this world. Pure, meaningful and trustworthy content means more activity from your visitors. If their experience in pleasant, not inhibited by spam checking devices or spent filtering spam themselves, they are much more likely to return.
- Robin Wauters at The Next Web: Mollom drops beta tag in quest to challenge Akismet. In the six months that the Belgium-based company has been beta-testing Mollom, they said to have blocked almost 9 million spam messages on thousands of sites.
- Glenn Paulley at Sybase: Fighting spam with Mollom. I’ve been using Mollom (as a beta customer) for several months for one of the websites that I manage and the effectiveness of Mollom’s techniques are impressive.
- Patrick Teglia: It's Best if You Don't See This. So, what makes Mollom different, from an end-user's point of view, than the other spam solutions I have tried (Akismet, Spam Karma, etc.)? Nothing, or rather, you have to do nothing, which is a whole lot less than what you do with the others. In fact, you don't have to deal with queues, moderation, constant attention and emails about all of the above. In other words you don't have to do anything. Oh, yeah, and the fact that it just plain works. I have yet to see a spam on my site.
- Robin Wauters at Tijd.be: Mollom niet langer in beta, krijgt er een betalend broertje bij. (Dutch article)
Thanks for the positive feedback, and I'm glad you like our service.
Mollom for Radiant
Frank Louwers of Openminds (my favorite hosting company), wrote a Mollom extension for the comment extension of Radiant, an Open Source CMS developed in Ruby. The extension is available from Gitub. Thanks Frank!
Mollom out of beta
I'm very proud to announce we've just taken the "beta" label of Mollom, the startup Benjamin Schrauwen and I began to help keep your website free of spam, and that we made our first commercial product available. In the six months we've been beta-testing Mollom, we've blocked almost 9 million spam messages on thousands of sites. Starting today, we intend to block many, many more.
As promised, our most basic service is still free. We make Mollom Free available for free because we think that making spam protection available to as many sites as possible is the right thing to do. While Mollom Free is a great fit for the vast majority of our install base, it is limited to 100 legitimate posts or comments it can process per day. For larger sites, our Mollom Plus service is a great solution, providing protection against post and comment spam for about 1 euro per day. Supporting a volume of 10,000 legitimate posts per day, and backed-up by multiple Mollom servers in data centers around the world, Mollom Plus is designed for the needs of large community sites, web businesses and enterprise sites. For the largest sites -- or for customers who have many sites to protect -- we're also rolling out volume licensing. More details regarding Mollom Plus, Mollom Free, and other service plan options are available on the Mollom pricing page and in the Mollom FAQ.
Even if you don't have a large site and you hate spam as much as we do and believe that Mollom's services have reduced the amount of time you're spending policing your content, consider a Mollom Plus subscription to help support our efforts to fight spam. Thanks!
Hagen's Drupal 6 book in the mail
Hagen Graf has written his second German Drupal book: Drupal 6: Websites entwickeln und verwalten mit dem Open Source-CMS published by Addison-Wesley. The book also comes with a German Drupal 6 training video. And for every copy sold, 1 EUR is donated to the Drupal Association Thanks Hagen!
@Hagen, next time take a picture of your book on my website? ;-)
The book talks about Mollom!
Mollom for DaliCMS
DaliCMS in an Open Source Web 2.0 content management system based on Glassfish, Sun's Open Source application server written in Java. DaliCMS is developed by LodgON and ships with Mollom support out of the box. Instructions on how to configure Mollom are available on this DaliCMS project page. Thanks LodgON!
Mollom t-shirts
Ben and I printed some Mollom t-shirts and we're going to ship some to people that contributed a Mollom plugin or that took advantage of the Mollom API in new or clever ways.
We've just sent some t-shirts to Mattias (Wordpress plugin), Tijs (PHP5 class), Markus (Joomla extension), Jan (Ruby library), Andy (Python library), Wim (summer intern) and more. Let us know if you integrated Mollom in your favorite tool or service!
We also set aside some t-shirts for people that write the best Mollom reviews or otherwise help us spread the word in new, clever or interesting ways ...
