Mollom offers new spam solution

October 4, 2008, 7:04pm,  107 views

Spam is a curse for blogs and email accounts. Bloggers now have a new option to combat the problem.

Mollom has proved very effective on several of my sites.

When new content is analysed by Mollom’s text-analysis filter, and Mollom is unsure if it is spam, it asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge.

This challenge-response procedure does not block human users.

For WordPress users it significantly reduces the amount of spam in moderation. Akismet and Defensio make (a small number of) mistakes and a blog owner needs to check the comments marked as spam.

Mollom lets dodgy-looking comments through if a CAPTCHA check is passed.

I’ve had two spam comments survive the scrutiny, presumably entered by people who bothered to make a manual entry.

I’d rather deal with the odd contrived comment than trawl through moderated spam.