Dries Buytaert

Michael Jackson using Drupal

Not only is there a new tour, but MichaelJackson.com, the official site for fans of the King of Pop, has just re-launched, featuring some new community-oriented features and some old-school graphics from back in the day. MichaelJackson.com was built using Drupal by the good folks at Sony Music. They are also using Mollom to protect against comment and forum post spam. Moonwalks!

Mollom software partner program

One of Mollom's main goals is to give you time to focus on your site, rather than fighting spam. We also don't want you to spend time worrying about your Mollom plugin. One way we prevent that is by finding high-quality companies who focus on specific content management systems, and partnering with them to provide world-class products and services. We agree to vet the quality of the product, they agree to commit substantial resources for development, maintenance, and support, and together we deliver a seamless, trouble-free experience.

Our partnerships provide many benefits. By sharing with our partners a percentage of the revenue generated by each of their Mollom Plus subscribers, and featuring their plugins, products, or services within their respective platforms, our partners benefit. By having a stable, high-quality set of plugins available for popular systems, we benefit. Through access to these well-managed and supported products and services, you benefit.

You can check Mollom's current partners on the Mollom partners page. Other projects or vendors interested in offering Mollom to their users through our Software Partner program should contact us.

Mollom and Moovum

Benjamin and I are excited to announce Mollom's first formal software partnership with Moovum, a new company founded by a number of past and present Joomla! core developers.

In collaboration with Mollom, Moovum has developed a world-class Mollom plugin for Joomla! that they've christened Moovur. Through Moovur, Mollom is able to fight more spam, and we hope to welcome many Joomla! users to the Mollom service. Thanks to Mollom's ability to learn to combat new spam techniques based on user feedback, our existing users on other platforms also benefit as we expand our user base.

This extension replaces the previous Mollom extension for Joomla (called Jollom) which was not being maintained properly. As an official Mollom Software Partner, Moovum is committed to help maintain, update and improve Moovur to give Joomla! users the best tools to fight spam and to help moderate their site's content. Mollom and Moovum will continue to work together to test and deploy new versions of the extension and to make sure that our users get the best possible service.

Both Moovum and Moovur are described in Moovum's press release and is available in release candidate from the Moovur download page. Moovur can be downloaded for free and comes with extensive end-user documentation as well as with development documentation that enables 3rd party developers to implement Moovur and Mollom into their solution with only a few lines of code. In the upcoming weeks the Moovum team will focus on the introduction of Moovur and work with 3rd party Joomla! developers to implement Moovur into their plugins.

Other companies or CMS vendors interested in offering Mollom to their users, please contact us about Mollom's new Software Partner Program.

World Food Programme using Drupal

The United Nations is using Drupal (and Mollom) for the World Food Programme. The World Food Programme is the world's largest humanitarian organization. With almost 12,000 people working for the World Food Programme, their food assistance reaches an average of 100 million people in 80 countries every year.

It is a stunning Drupal 6 website built by Phase2 Technology and Development Seed. Awesome!

More milestones for Mollom

It's been several months since I last updated you on Mollom's success at blocking comment spam. At the time, Mollom had just blocked its ten-millionth spam attempt and I mentioned in my post that we'd been growing fast. Indeed, in the last couple of days, we've marked a few important milestones.

Mollom has now blocked over 25 million spam attempts since Benjamin and I began this adventure ten months ago. Also as of today, we're actively protecting over 5,000 websites and we finally cracked an average efficiency of 99.9%. In other words, only 10 in 10,000 spam messages make it through our filtering. Our accuracy has gone up slowly but surely, so hitting 99.9% is an important and exciting milestone for us. We're not resting on our laurels; we think we can do even better so expect to see it climb even more.

Of course, Mollom isn't the only website protection service. Defensio made big news today with the announcement that it had been acquired by security company Websense. Sending e-mail spam is getting more and more difficult to do effectively, and the traditional security companies are probably starting to observe the increase of spammers targeting websites instead of mailboxes. Websense having Defensio in its toolbox makes sense to me.

There are only a small number of services that actively work to stem the tide of website spam, and our friends at Defensio are also fighting the good fight. I'd like to congratulate them on their acquisition, and wish them the best.

O'Reilly Drupal book in the mail

The O'Reilly Drupal book, titled Using Drupal, finally arrived in the mail. Yay!

I provided technical review of some early versions of chapters, and as promised, the book is as good as you'd suspect it would be from Lullabot and O'Reilly. Great work Angela, Addi, Nate, Jeff Eaton, James, and Jeff Robbins!

Mollom now has "CAPTCHA only" mode

We're excited to announce a new release of the Mollom module for Drupal 6. The Mollom 1.7 release for Drupal 6 is our most extensive update so far, and contains a number of new features.

For end-users, the most obvious new feature is our ability to now protect forms with CAPTCHAs only. Previously, all forms enabled for Mollom were protected by Mollom's text analysis algorithms, with CAPTCHA challenges used as backup. Though that is still the default option, you may set individual forms to use a "CAPTCHA only" form of protection. Data on forms protected with "CAPTCHA only" is not sent for analysis, and the forms always present a remotely-hosted CAPTCHA challenge. With these changes, the Mollom module for Drupal can now act as a replacement to the CAPTCHA module. For a screenshot of the configuration page, please see the Drupal module tutorial at http://mollom.com/tutorials/drupal.

Mollom's CAPTCHA service also provides audio CAPTCHAs, an important feature that allows greater participation from the visually impaired. Further, Mollom's CAPTCHA challenges are generated remotely, allowing us to constantly monitor CAPTCHA quality. If (when!) hackers solve them, we tweak them in ways that make them more difficult to crack. We believe this makes Mollom's CAPTCHAs better than locally generated CAPTCHAs.

We've made a lot of other improvements under the hood, including many that will allow greater support for additional forms in the future.

Thanks to Damien Tournoud from AF83 and Keith Smith for their contributions to the 1.7 release.