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.
Comments
pr0n! barely legal!*
*not really
[ ^ mollom caught this, but, were I a human spammer (hammer?), I could just fill out the CAPTCHA box and post my spam…]
I don’t think there’s any guaranteed way to eliminate human-powered spam, other than human-powered content monitoring.
I use Akismet on two of my blogs. It does a good job at stopping the spambots, but like you said there is little protection from human spam.
Still some of the partially relevant comments I get at my blogs are sure to be from spambots. The spammers are using more generic comments which could apply to almost anything.
Software, like xRumer, needs to be blasted off the face of this planet. Not only does it attack blogs, but also forums and about anything that accepts a user URL.
I honestly have never used Mollom, but I will check it out. I’m on the hunt for a spam filter that does not require a set of eyes to view each and every post. I doubt this will ever exist, but I will never give up hope. :)
PS: It took me a few captcha attempts to get this comment through!
@Bill: No wonder it took you so long; the URl you supplied looks pretty spammy.