Monitor Your Content With Mollom

mollom.gifEarlier this week a new content monitoring service called Mollom was released. I say content monitoring service because the service is intended to go well beyond spam detection and into monitoring the quality of content itself.

For now the service, co-founded by Dries Buytaert (the founder of the drupal project) and Benjamin Schrauwen, is free and in a public beta phase. Eventually, there will be pay services for companies and sites with high traffic while the free services will remain for your average site owner.

I've been using mollom for some time, while it was in a private beta, and currently have it running on http://geeksandgod.com and http://www.fshbwl.com. The protection from spam has been great with two exceptions that have come up on geeksandgod.com. First, we get hit with short phrases, like posts where the content reads "G'night" or "hello". It makes no sense and is completely out of context. Like, a forum post where "Later" is the content.

The second type of spam is short phrases in the Cyrillic alphabet on an English language site. Again, these are usually just one or two word phrases and don't fit the typical spam model.

I've not read or heard of others having the same problems that we have had and overall I'm impressed. If you're curious about how the service works, how accurate the service is, or how you can integrate it with your site check out the Mollom website.

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Was wondering

I was wondering on G&G what the heck was up with all those short phrases in the forums. :)

When we switched to Mollom

When we switched to using Mollom that started happening. We have debated what to do about it. Should we just go back to a regular captcha? At this point we have decided to stay with Mollom in hopes of it getting better.

I don't see what or where they would be coming from. They aren't really spam because they don't advertise anything. It's really strange.

Thanks

This is very interesting. I've been trying to figure out how to handle moderating a growing social site and this fits the bill. Pretty cool that Dries is behind it too.

How odd...

I have been getting the same odd "hello goodbye" posts since I started using Mollom as well. I wonder if it's some bot seeking out Mollom sites?

Michelle

PS: No Mollom on here?

Not Yet

So, I'm not the only one getting those odd posts. I hope this fix that soon.

As for installing Mollom here, I just have not gotten around to it yet. It's on the to do list. I may wait for the "hello goodbye" posts to be handled before I make the switch here.

Short posts

Interesting, I haven't had a problem with short messages on my own site.

Can you check whether these messages were categorized as 'ham' or as 'unsure'? See the watchdog of your Drupal site.

When these short messages get through, make sure to provide Mollom feedback about it so it can learn to block them. Mollom should get better as more people start to use Mollom.

Ham

The short posts that get through are being categorized as ham. For example, the most recent one to hit my site had this in the watchdog:

Ham: <p>Hello </p> <p>Bye</p>

I've seen mollom learn over the months I've been using it. It is smarter and better than it used to be. And, I really like that you can categorize the unwanted content as more than just standard spam.

Forum Spam

For anyone interested I found that all of the short posts were coming from one spam server and that it was a known spam server to http://www.stopforumspam.com/.