Mollom - 5 Month Result - It works! Drupal 6 Content Quality Control Module (Anti Spam)
Posted by admin | Filed under Computing and IT, Pick and Mix
Late last October, I was hunting for a solution to the ever increasing malicious content that gets posted through site forms on drupal sites (that might be unfair, sites in general!).
I had already tried out the Captcha module for a few months, but the module was buggy at the time (I believe it was a quick port from drupal 5), and fixes generally involved core hacks so I wasn’t keen on that at the time, I can’t remember the exact reason, it might come back to me…and I’ll edit this. In fact looking back, the module still hasn’t been updated regularly for a while, although there is a new Beta Release Candidate (3) that came out yesterday (7th of april 2009), and the previous release was 2008-Apr-11 2008…almost a year, you get my point.
Anyway, I came across the Mollom module, which putting it simply, sends your content through the mollum servers for analysis, and either gives your site submissions the thumbs or down. It’s pretty damn accurate, here are some figures from their website:
Mollom is currently protecting 7,367 active websites. The average efficiency is 99.95%. This means that only 5 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. Mollom has caught 51,266,317 spam messages since it started. Today we caught 437,408 spam messages. On average, 85% of all messages are spam.
You can view their statistics scorecard here
Additionally, the module worked with drupal 6 pretty much flawlessly, and was a 15 minute installation. That’s damn nice considering how effective it has been on one of the sites I maintain, check out the module statistics (you can make this available via the drupal permissions system).
I will point out, if your website grows, you will probably run into a situation where you have to upgrade to a mollum plus account, which is 1 EURO a roughly, considering it’s killing tons of spam, with hardly any false positives, I’d happily pay for it. You can view more details of their pricing model here.
The Mollom Module for Drupal 6 is configurable as well, you can choose either Text Analysis, Captcha or Both. You can see how it looks from an admin perspective here:
Now, I don’t generally expect a FREE service to be available 100% of the time, but so far, the mollom service hasn’t had any noticeable outtages for me. However, they included a fallback system, so if their Text Analysis service is unavailable, it falls back to Captcha mode, which is nice, so it’s not going to hang my site waiting for an external service which doesn’t answer. You can see the config settings for that and the area where you enter your api keys (I’ve deleted the keys from the pic, but you get the idea) here:
I’m not alone in my thumbs up, check out some further testimonials here.
Tags: addon, anti, drupal, module, spam, web development