You probably know it by now: Dries Buytaert started yet another company: Its product is “Mollom”, a comment spam filtering webservice, similar to Akismet. Congratulations, Dries! I’ve been one of the very first beta testers (User ID #5 on mollom.com) and have been using the module since a bit more than 9 months now. At first, I still had some issues with comment spam getting through Mollom’s filter, but that eventually stopped during the last couple of months.

I haven’t used Akismet in a while now (I did use it before switching to Mollom), so I can’t really tell whether it’s more accurate. While there are some minor nitpicks, I’m rather satisified with Mollom.

Mollom wants to distinguish itself from Akismet by not only blocking spam: The goal is to “improve overall content quality”. While I get virtually no automated comment spam anymore, I now get actual humans who post spam comments. These comments are usually somewhat related to the blog post. That means I’m not getting generic “This content is great!” comments, but for instance, “This bundle is very useful. Thanks!” on my blog post about the TextMate Drupal bundle. Sounds like a valid comment, however, the supplied comment author homepage contains clearly a spam URL.