Mollom May Soon Offer Serious Competition To Akismet
Duncan Riley
24 comments »
Mollom is a new blog spam prevention tool that’s shaping up to be serious competition to Automattic’s Akismet, the current market leader.
Belgium based Mollom was founded earlier this year by Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of the Drupal project and Benjamin Schrauwen, a Post-Doc researcher at Ghent University and Machine Learning expert. Mollom automatically blocks comment form spam, contact form spam and fake user accounts using a filtering technique based on the combination of content analysis and CAPTCHA challenges.
When new content is analyzed by Mollom’s intelligent text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is ham or spam, it asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge. This challenge-response procedure doesn’t block human users. If an unwanted message still makes it onto a website, users can help fight back by reporting to Mollom. The service learns from its mistakes.
According to statistics from Mollom (they publish a full scorecard here), the service is 99.94% accurate, making 6 mistakes per 10,000 comments, but one key to the service is its ability to learn as it goes along, so the team is aiming to improve those figures over time.
The business model will be similar to Akismet (they’re currently in beta testing only); the basic Mollom service will be free with commercial/ high-traffic websites paying but getting more advanced features, improved reliability and performance. They also plans to offer dedicated, managed Mollom servers for high-end users. Current Mollom users include Sony BMG, Adobe and FastCompany.
Buytaert told me that although offering the same features as the competition, Mollom’s goal goes further than spam-blocking alone.
We want to increase the overall quality of your site’s content. For example, Mollom’s CAPTCHA service already helps block fake user accounts, and we are experimenting with various automated content-quality assessments, including blocking obscene, violent and profane content.
The service is already getting a lot of positive buzz in the Drupal community and the statistics are impressive. They don’t currently have a WordPress version, but they did ask that I mention they’re looking for a WordPress developer to write one, contact details here if you’re interested.
See also Defensio, an advanced Akismet competitor. (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/defensio)
They are aiming to improve the 99.94% ?
I think they are going to be a serious competitor to Akismet
If their service (optionally) presents a CAPTCHA after submission, based on the comment content, I hope that there’s a mechanism where the fact that their servers are down doesn’t prevent user comments. If Akismet goes down, bloggers get flooded with comment spam, but legit users can still post. If Mollom relies on its own servers to analyze each message before postback, I could foresee a situation where Mollom being down prevent any comments from posting…
Competition is always a wonderful thing, especially in the world of SPAM but I don’t see Wordpress bundling Mollom with it’s offerings anytime soon.
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
We will have to watch this. I never use anything until it is tried and proven though. Too dangerous for a novice like me.
uh, hubris has settled in amongst these spam fighters, as is well stated here:
http://tinyurl.com/6kp6gn
Anyone who is tired of Akismet blocking commentators and want to only block the real Spam Malware domain links please have a look at http://www.phsdl.net
PHSDL anti Spam filter is a free service that I have developed to help bloggers fight Spam. You just need to add a little PHP script to your WordPress blog.
Also works with other blogs and forums.
Regards,
Igor
Akismet generally good but once in a full moon eat up the wrong thing.
Duncan, you refer to Akismet as the market leader. Do you have stats and a source for them?
@Aaron: the Drupal module for Mollom has an option that allows you to configure what happens when the Mollom servers are unavailable (i.e. block all comments, accept all comments). We have servers in different data centers so that shouldn’t happen too often.
For those who want to learn some more about Mollom, please consult the following two blog posts:
1. http://buytaert.net/website-sp.....ion-queues
2. http://buytaert.net/spam-openid-and-mollom
I have actually installed it on one of my blogs (running Drupal 5.x — haven’t had a chance to upgrade to Drupal 6 yet). That blog of mine was running the Drupal Akismet plugin and for the last 3 months the false negative rate gets pretty bad.
After running it for 3 days and it is already blocking 1,300+ spams. Not to mention a nice Flex-based graph right inside your Drupal admin area to display number of spams squashed against time.
Problem? There does not seem to be a way to find out whether those spams blocked are false positives. They don’t go to the moderation queue — they just disappears.
Andrew
No, I don’t handy (although I probably could find a reference), but after years covering the blogging industry, then taking a blog network through VC it was the only serious choice for blogs and although I cant prove this, I’d bet maybe 80-90% of anyone running a WordPress install is using Akismet, and WordPress is usually regarded as the market leader in self hosted blogging. There’s also Akismet versions for other platforms as well. Are their commercial grade alternatives, yes, but I say market leading in terms of user numbers, not revenue or similar. It’s probably the only thing Matt Mullenweg and I will ever agree on
@Scott: not having a moderation queue in Mollom is a much debated topic, but it’s something the developers really believe in — they have discussed the issue here: http://buytaert.net/website-sp.....ion-queues
and here:
http://mollom.com/spam-vs-ham
Duncan,
Thanks for the response. I would agree with you (and Matt) that Akismet has got to be the market leader, but I’d be interested in stats if there are any available.
Now, back to my own post on this and on the recent Six Apart activity…
There’s also defensio.com from the guys at karabunga.com
@Dries — thanks for the link. Maybe I am just so used to Akismet’s “spam-ham-maybe?” issue and think a moderation queue is necessary because false positives are almost unavoidable.
However, I am happy with no moderation queue ONLY if I trust this technology. Mollom is new and yet to be proved — how does it earn trust from its users if I cannot be assured that no legitimate comment has been marked as spam?
@Scott Y - check out your logs and filter by mollom messages. It has all the information you need right there. The body of the content that had been attempted. I used to check mine daily but frankly after almost a year of alpha and beta testing I don’t bother anymore.
I’ve been having a lot of spam coming through Aksimet, hopefully some good competition will force Akismet to get a little bit better with its spam filtering.