Mollom - Out of Beta and Ready to Eat Your Spam (without bothering your normal visitors)

My experience with Mollom has been highly enjoyable. I used to get lots of spam comments on various sites I run which I blocked and cleaned manually. Then I installed the CAPTCHA module which helped a bit, but was annoying to users, let past some bots, and wasn't entirely accessible. I installed Mollom when it entered Beta a few months ago. The concept of only presenting a CAPTCHA when the content is likely spam really appeals to me. It's better for users and admins alike (as long as you don't mind shipping your data off to someone else's servers...which I don't).

Busy Summer for Mollom

This has been an exciting season for Mollom. They started the Summer (Northern-Hemisphere Summer anyway) by hiring Wim Leers who proceeded to build and document lots of tools which were also released to the community. Quite a nice contribution to the community both by Wim and Mollom.

Perhaps most interesting to folks, though will be a little data I've gathered about Mollom (I figured why let them have all the fun of inspecting my data - I'll look at a bit of theirs!)

Of course I'm not talking about cracking into their site to steal data, just using the data provided on their front page and a little OpenOffice.org fun to make a graph of their growth in terms of number of sites and spam blocked. It's kind of surprising to me that the two lines are shaped so similarly - then again maybe it shouldn't be.

Out of Beta - Still Accessible as "Mollom Free"

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.

Congratulations on the launch of the service, Dries, Ben and Wim!