Mollom
Harvard using Drupal
I recently learned about the fact that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society is using Drupal. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is a research center founded at Harvard Law School whose fellows included internet gurus like David Weinberger, John Perry Barlow, Dave Winer, Jimmy Wales, Doc Searls and many more.
Other notable Drupal sites at Harvard are the website of the Science and Engineering department, the website of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (they aim to solve major problems that affect society and the well-being of human populations), the website of Initiative in Innovative Computing (a center of expertise in solving very difficult computing problems), and last but not least Harvard Magazine (a magazine that keeps 240,000 alumni connected to the university). Harvard Magazine is also using Mollom.
Mollom filtering millions of messages for Netlog
We're proud to announce that Mollom has partnered with Netlog, one of the fastest-growing web communities in Europe. Mollom is now protecting the messages of more than 40 million Netlog members, in more than 25 different languages. Netlog is primarily used by students for communication, entertainment and for sharing music and photos. Each day, Netlog members exchange more than 4 million messages, all analyzed by Mollom for spam and unwanted content in real-time.
Netlog selected Mollom as its content-filtering solution after initial trials suggested that Mollom's content filtering algorithms produced more effective results, and after validating Mollom's ability to consistently provide real-time responses. With the addition of the Netlog community, Mollom is now one of the largest website spam-filtering services available today.
We established dedicated Mollom servers in Netlog's data center, each with automatic fail-over, around-the-clock monitoring and custom-trained classifiers. Every second, these servers analyze over 50 messages (and up to 200 messages/second at peak times), proving Mollom's ability to scale to massive throughput requirements. Just like the servers handling Mollom Free and Mollom Plus users on mollom.com, these dedicated servers are maintaining 99.95% efficiency, blocking all but the smallest fraction of spam content.
Netlog has more then 30 freelance community managers and moderators throughout Europe. For their part, using Mollom allows Netlog to reduce the amount of manual moderation, and enables Netlog to support more users and different languages more easily. For our part, Mollom is committed to ensuring that our service supports that growth. This partnership provides us a great opportunity to improve our backend, to prototype new ideas for streamlining the moderation of thousands of messages, and to use Mollom in a massively-multilingual environment. For your part, well, Mollom subscribers are already benefiting from filter improvements that were the direct result of this partnership, and that's just the beginning.
Update: see also Techrunch's coverage: European social network Netlog to use Mollom’s spam filtering tool.
Mollom and SilverStripe
I'm excited to announce that SilverStripe Limited, the commercial firm responsible for the open source SilverStripe CMS, have become Mollom's second formal software partner.
In February, we announced our software partner program, explaining that our goal was finding high-quality companies able to deliver a seamless, trouble-free Mollom experience within the leading CMS products.
We have been working with Sigurd Magnusson and others at SilverStripe Limited to meet technical and commercial requirements of being a partner, and have been pleased at how easy this has been. SilverStripe's CMS also looks to have a bright future: while young, it now has over 150,000 downloads to date, a great user interface and underlying architecture, and last year won Packtpub's most promising open source CMS award. Therefore, our partnership with SilverStripe certainly meets our goals, and we're happy to have them on board to help the Mollom ecosystem grow.
This announcement coincides with the recent release of SilverStripe 2.3.1, and for an obvious reason: Mollom is now available as an official vendor-supported module for SilverStripe. The Mollom implementation in the new version protects page and blog comments, forum module user registrations, forum posts, custom forms created within the CMS user interface, and (optionally) custom PHP forms using a special field type. These features are detailed at SilverStripe's announcement blog post, which contains this 3 minute screencast:
SilverStripe's Mollom module page and Mollom installation instructions provide further information and screenshots. You can also easily try it out at the official SilverStripe demo website, which has Mollom activated on the blog comment and forum registration pages.
SilverStripe's Mollom code was originally contributed late last year by Dieter Orens, an experienced programmer within SilverStripe's open source developer community. Initially only supporting Mollom's CAPTCHA feature, Dieter's code was significantly extended by the core SilverStripe team to meet quality and feature requirements we requested. Underscoring the need for a spam filter, Sigurd mentions that their SilverStripe.com and SilverStripe.org websites received together over 400,000 website spam attempts in the last month. Only about one in 10,000 spam attempts get through, though, making the moderation process feasible and efficient to control. Needless to say, SilverStripe understands the value of Mollom.
Product partnerships like this are one way we give you time to focus on your site, rather than fighting spam. Our other partners are listed on the Mollom partners page, and a complete list of available plugins is available on the Download page. Other projects or vendors interested in offering Mollom to their users through our Software Partner program should contact us.
Gamezebo using Drupal
Gamezebo is using Drupal and Mollom to power its game community. For those who don't know, Gamezebo is a Webby Award-nominated website that focuses on editorial coverage of the "casual games industry". The site is founded by industry veteran Joel Brodie, former head of business development at Yahoo! Games, and has an editorial staff that has written for publications like USA Today, CNN, and the New York Times. Tree House Agency completed all of the development and theming of the site.
Happy belated first birthday, WP-Mollom
On his blog, Matthias Vandermaesen comments that his Mollom plugin for Wordpress was a year old on April 2nd of this year. At the same time, he announces the release of WP-Mollom 0.7.4 (which mainly includes some new translations), and lays out a roadmap for future development.
But what a difference a year makes. One year later, Mollom has blocked well over fifty million pieces of spam, and Matthias' Wordpress plugin is an important part of the Mollom ecosystem.
In his blog post, Matthias lays out a great set of feature enhancements and code refactoring in his blog post; like us, he's interested in optimizing his plugin code as much as possible. He's got lots of great usability ideas as well, and contemplates new features to integrate with the upcoming WordPress 2.8.
Matthias -- Happy Birthday to WP-Mollom. Let us know how we can help!
Fifty million spam attempts blocked
A day or so ago, Mollom blocked its fifty-millionth spam attempt, reaching another milestone in a list that is expanding with increasing frequency. After all, it was only a little over two months ago (on January 28th) that we reached twenty-five million, about six months ago (on October 6th) that we reached ten million, and about a year ago (on March 31, 2008) that Benjamin and I began Mollom.
According to our scorecard, we're currently protecting over 7,000 websites from comment spam, with an average efficiency of 99.95%. Only 5 in every 10,000 spam messages slip past our filters, and even that small number continues to fall as Mollom's accuracy improves. Around 85% of all the messages processed by Mollom are spam.
Even though we're still a small company by all standards, we're proud of what we've done to help stem the spread of comment spam. The Mollom download page features plugins for five different CMS's (including Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress, Radiant, and SilverStripe), and seven different developer libraries (including Java, PHP5, Ruby, Python, ColdFusion, .NET, and the Zend Framework). Our pricing page describes our current product offerings, and our exciting new Software Partners page describes a few special partnerships we've formed to help supercharge your Mollom experience.
Fifty million is a big number, but we're just getting started. More to come!
SilverStripe to add native Mollom support
SilverStripe has announced that the upcoming release of their open-source CMS includes native support for Mollom. According to the announcement, SilverStripe's Mollom implementation protects page and blog comments, user registrations, forum posts, and custom PHP forms.
The SilverStripe Mollom installation instructions provide additional information on how to install and use Mollom with your installation of the release candidate. The installation instructions also show some screenshots of Mollom in action.
If you're a SilverStripe user, take the release candidate for a test drive and file any bugs you encounter at open.silverstripe.com.
