Mollom sites
Christina Aguilera using Drupal
Christina Aguilera just relaunched her website using Drupal: http://www.christinaaguilera.com/. The site is developed by Sony Music, and is one of the better looking Drupal sites that I have seen Sony Music launch. No pun intended! Welcome to the family, Christina!
NVidia using Drupal
NVidia recently launched their new Tegra developer community on Drupal. See http://developer.nvidia.com/tegra. The announcement of the latest Tegra 2 chipset was one of the major news items at CES earlier this month. The Tegra 2 chipset incorporates 8 independent processors to handle web browsing, HD video encoding/decoding as well as mobile gaming, all with very low power consumption. It is perfect for tablets ...
NVidia came to Acquia to help them get the site built. Development was done by Chapter Three (an Acquia partner) and Wiredcraft, while Acquia hosts the site on the Acquia Hosting platform and provides 24x7 monitoring and support. They are also using Mollom to protect their site against spammers.
Linux Journal using Drupal and Mollom
Linux Journal is a monthly magazine focused specifically on Linux. Linux Journal switched to Drupal in 2005, and hasn't looked back since. Last year in October of 2008 Linux Journal decided to turn to Mollom to protect their site against spammers.
In a case study on Mollom.com, Linux Journal Webmistress Katherine Druckman looks back at one year of using Mollom, and explains how Mollom has helped the Linux Journal staff focus on building community, rather than having to deal with spam.
To give you an idea of how much pain spammers can inflict (and how much Mollom can help); there have been many days when Mollom has blocked almost 10k spam attacks against the Linux Journal website. Last year, Mollom blocked more than 1.5 million spam messages for Linux Journal alone.
Linux Journal was the first magazine to be published about Linux, and has been an important contributor to Linux' adoption. I started reading Linux Journal back in 1997, and I still read it today. We want these kind of publications to be wildly successful in promoting Open Source software. So on rainy Mondays like today, it is stories like this, that motivate me to work on Drupal and Mollom, and that make me hate spammers even more.
The Industry Standard using Drupal and Mollom
The online media industry continues to face readership and revenue challenges. They are burdened with the task of not only providing the content but gaining more user interaction in the form of reader comments. Comments by readers are beneficial to sites because they show created readership and mean more eyeballs to that particular page or article. For publishers, more eyeballs means more revenue.
The Industry Standard is a news and analysis site owned by IDG, a large publishing organization that publishes over 300 magazines in 85 countries!
The Industry Standard re-launched on Drupal in 2008 with the goal of engaging with new readers and encouraging them to contribute comments and content. They also wanted to allow readers to comment anonymously, something that most news sites do not do. The Industry Standard felt that anonymity gave readers more freedom to express their comments, and would encourage more frequent and detailed commentary while expanding traffic and tying the publication into the many other online conversations taking place around technology.
Ian Lamont, The Industry Standard's managing editor, had prior experience managing online communities, and knew that the relaunched publication would need a comment filter that could encourage quality comments while sifting out spam and trolls.
According to Lamont, having anonymous comments is hugely important to The Industry Standard. "We really believe that most people don't want to deal with the hassle of registration. Because we are relatively small, if we only had registered comments, there would be far less reader engagement on the site. As it is now, we can have dialogues with unregistered users, which is really important to building voice and an online identity."
The Industry Standard is using Mollom to help them remove the barrier to visitor participation, allowing readers to comment anonymously and eliminate spam vandalism. Since the re-launch in 2008, Mollom has blocked 800k spam messages in 539 days and blocked more than a thousand attempts a day with peaks up to several thousands a day. Cool!
Radio Netherlands Worldwide using Drupal
Radio Netherlands Worldwide (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep in Dutch or RNW for short) is a public radio and television network based in The Netherlands. Radio Netherlands Worldwide is a very old international public broadcaster, with regular transmissions that began in 1927 to the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.
What is interesting about the site is not the design or the implementation, but the fact that, after many years with Alterian (formerly Mediasurface), they switched to Drupal. Alterian is a supplier of proprietary content management systems, with their flagship product being Morello. The RNW started with the Internet early on (1992) and by doing so suffered from the law of the handicap of a head start: a history of dated, proprietary CMS-es that held them back from moving to the more current software.
RNW selected Drupal because of its multi-lingual capabilities (they support up to 6 languages, including Chinese and Arabic content) and Drupal's flexibility and agility. The migration to Drupal was done by Dutch Open Projects and took 3 months with a team of 5 people.
Bert Boerland, project manager at Dutch Open Projects, wrote the following on the switch to Drupal: By itself, the fact that Radio Netherlands Worldwide switches from a proprietary CMS towards an Open Source CMS is not the biggest news. However, the switch is a milestone since it symbolizes that companies that didn't look to Open Source and only listened to the proprietary "prietpraat" are moving over! [The word prietpraat is Dutch and translates roughly to "childish non-sense".]
With both RNW and the Dutch public broadcaster NCRV using Drupal, and through Acquia's partnership with Woodwing (Woodwing is a Dutch company), the media landscape in Europe's low-lands has some critical mass to push Drupal into more traditional broadcasting companies. Drupal starts to disrupt the traditional, proprietary web content management space increasingly more.
With an editorial staff of over one hundred people, RNW publicizes dozens of postings a day including their own video and audio, and will soon incorporate even more, including user-generated content and content from their five-thousand-plus partner stations around the world. To keep all this content on track, RNW choose Drupal, coupled with the usual contributed modules (CCK and Views, FCKeditor, Pathauto, etc). They use Organic Groups as their core for separating and integrating their eleven editorial staffs. RNW gets lots of traffic from around the world and so, gets lots of spam, they are also a paying Mollom user; Mollom blocks hundreds of spam comments a day for them.
NowPublic using Mollom
NowPublic is a Vancouver-based news network that mobilizes an army of reporters to cover events around the world. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in affected areas than most news organizations have on their entire staff.
Unfortunately, NowPublic was up against as many as 25,000 spam attempts a day, so it needed a solution that would allow the site to grow faster and more effectively without being slowed by comment spam. About one year ago, NowPublic implemented Mollom to protect their site against spam. They use Drupal, so all they needed to do was install the Mollom module for Drupal.
Two major challenges arise from trying to control website spam. First, visitors may lose their motivation to comment or contribute content because they are required so often to prove that they are human and not spam by registering. This erodes participation. Secondly, whether visitors are asked to register or not, site moderation becomes more time-consuming and expensive. Website moderators have to scan comments and other content to find spam instead of interact with the community. Mollom differs from other spam protection solutions, in that it tries to address both problems.
While Mollom is not perfect (it is a work in progress), it works really well for the vast majority of our users. In NowPublic's case, Mollom has prevented more than one million spam attempts since they started using Mollom. Plus, because Mollom removed barriers to participation, they saw an 180% increase in the average number of comments posted per month by users since implementing Mollom's spam-filtering service. Last but not least, according to Jordan Yerman, NowPublic's Contributor Support Manager, Mollom saved NowPublic at least one hour per day dealing with spam. So by the end of the first month, they saved more money than Mollom cost them for the year.
Needless to say, NowPublic is one of my favorite Mollom success stories. Now they are one year into using Mollom, it is rewarding to look back and see how well it has worked for them.
(Disclosure: I am an advisor to NowPublic.)
Jacksonville using Drupal
Jacksonville, the largest city in Florida, is using Drupal (and Mollom) at http://jacksonville.com. The Florida Times-Union is the major daily newspaper in Jacksonville and Jacksonville.com is its official website. Cool!
