Spam filtering tool Mollom, a competitor to Automattic’s Akismet, has struck a deal to filter messages and comments for Netlog, one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks. Mollom will be filtering more than 4 million messages in over 25 languages for Netlog, which has 40 million worldwide users.
Mollom says that it has set up dedicated servers within Netlog’s data center to enable real-time, 24/7 monitoring of messages and comments. Mollom’s technology automatically blocks comment 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 text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure whether it is spam, Mollom 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 report this spam to Mollom. According to Mollom, the startup’s servers analyze more than 50 messages every second, reaching up to 200 messages per second during peak times and maintaining 99.95 percent efficiency in detecting and blocking all spam content.
Mollom is positioning its deal with Netlog as a sign that the spam filtering tool is gaining the trust of big-time clients and perhaps coming closer to being a serious competitor to Akismet, the current market leader in the space. It still has a ways to go before it can challenge Akismet. Six Apart also offers a competitive anti-spamming feature, TypePad AntiSpam.
Netlog is growing fast, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle-East, where it serves as the community portal of choice thanks to its viral nature and extensive language translation program. Belgium-based Mollom was founded on 2008 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. Other well-known Mollom users include Sony BMG, Adobe and FastCompany.