Given that the product has only been out of beta since September 2008, that gives you an idea of just how much junk travels the digital highways. According to Mollom co-founder Dries Buytaert (also the creator of Drupal, one of the most used open source content management systems in the world), the solution is now used by about 10,000 websites across the globe, and the rate at which it is blocking spam messages from appearing on the Web is rapidly increasing. In a blog post, Buytaert says Mollom reached the 25 million blocked spam messages milestone five months ago, and got to the point where it filtered out 50 million of them only two months ago.

The full scorecard, as publicly posted on the company website:

“Mollom is currently protecting 10,052 active websites. The average efficiency is 99.93%. This means that only 7 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. Mollom has caught 100,537,961 spam messages since it started. Today we caught 297,061 spam messages. On average, 89% of all messages are spam.”

In reality, the number of filtered junk messages is much higher, since he doesn’t take into account private servers it operates on behalf of larger clients and only counts the ones that get blocked on public servers. About 4 million of comment and post spam messages per month get filtered out of just one social network, the rapidly growing Netlog, with which it struck a deal two months ago. In aggregate, Mollom is processing up to 150 million messages a month, which translates to the company needing to handle over 200 million HTTP requests to analyze them appropriately.

That’s a lot of viagra selling drivel for you.

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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.

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Website security software company Websense has acquired Defensio, a comment spam blocker used by blogs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Defensio competes with Akismet, the spam blocker that comes with Wordpress, and Mollom. One of Defensio’s features is that it can sort blocked comments by spamminess and also offers an API for use on Websites other than blogs.

Websense will incorporate Defensio into its ThreatSeeker Network, where it will help detect comment spam on blogs, forums, and social networks. Websense also plans on extending Defensio so that it works on broadly distributed Web applications.

The company recently used Defensio technology to detect malicious hackers on BarackObama.com. Moreover, Websense claims to have research showing that:

. . . more than 95 percent of all Web posts on blogs, forums and other sites are unwanted content such as spam and malicious content. Additionally, more than 70 percent of all Web spam and unwanted content is hosted on legitimate sites that allow user-generated content.

That sounds inflated to me, but comment spam definitely is a problem that needs to be squashed. So the more technologies out there trying to squash it, the better.

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TypePad AntiSpam is clearly aimed at Akismet, a similar spam fighting tool offered by arch-rival Automattic. Like Akismet, TypePad AntiSpam takes a multi-headed heuristic approach to detecting and blocking comment spam on blogs. But TypePad’s product is free – Akismet charges $5/month for commercial blogs making more than $500/month in revenue, and has performance limitations on the free version.

TypePad AntiSpam is also open source, and anyone can download the source code and create their own spam tool based on it. Akismet isn’t open source, although they have an API that allows developers to, among other things, develop additional integration tools for blogging platforms.

We are long time users of Akismet on the TechCrunch blogs, and I’ve included it in my last two yearly lists of products I can’t live without (2007, 2008) along with Wordpress, Automattic’s blogging software. Akismet blocks over 15,000 spam comments per day on TechCrunch.

But last week we switched to TypePad AntiSpam as a test, crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. After a week I’m pleased to say that as good as Akismet is, the TypePad product has performed as good or better for us.

The product classifies comments as “ham” (good), “spam” (bad) or unknown (moderation). So far I’ve seen no good comments hit the spam folder (false positives), something that happens regularly with Akismet. Only a handful of spam comments made it to the site (false negatives). It seems like the rate of false negatives is lower than Akismet, but the team reviews the site for these regularly and so it’s impossible to compare them statistically, I’m just making a guestimate.

Twice now a large group of spam comments hit the moderation queue, but Six Apart says it was their system thinking we were under a denial of service attack from the sheer flow of spam attempts and triggering everything to moderation. They’ve now adjusted for that, and we haven’t seen it again.

TypePad AntiSpam is available now via plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type. Akismet has a much longer list of supported platforms – Six Apart says they will add more over time and, like Akismet, will rely on the developer community to pitch in as well.

If you are a blogger and don’t use a service to manage spam, you’ll want to use Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam. I recommend either. For now, we’ll stick with TypePad, and continue to report on how its doing.

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Mollom

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.

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On January 4 we reported that the Akismet filter had stopped a million spam comments from reaching TechCrunch. At that point we’d been using it for about nine months.

The number of blocked spam comments is now two million, just ten weeks later. That works out to about 15,000 spam comments hitting TechCrunch every day.

If we did not have Akismet, we couldn’t allow anonymous commenting here on TechCrunch. We used to go through all spam comments to pick out the occasional false positive and accept it. Now, there are just too many to go through. All comments marked by Akismet as spam get deleted almost immediately.

We’ve now implemented a Wordpress-recommended custom plugin that turns comments off on posts that are more than two weeks old. This will significantly reduce the overall amount of spam that hits the blog, so I don’t expect to see this total spam number continue to increase exponentially.

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I named blog spam catcher Akismet as one of the products I couldn’t live without in a post a few days ago. Today we hit the magic number – Akismet has captured over 1 million spam comments and trackbacks, just on TechCrunch. That’s over 1 million pieces of bogus content that we didn’t have to read, sort through manually and delete.

Akismet is a relatively easy plugin to install if you use Wordpress, and there are developer tools available if you want to use it on another blogging platform or website. If you have a blog, and don’t know about Akismet, take a minute and check it out.

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