anti spam

A request was just sent out on Mollom's Twitter account to help them spread the word on Mollom. Since I've been an extremely satisfied user of this (free) anti-spam service for about 2 years now, I immediately added a link back to them in the footer of this blog. But I decided that's not enough. So I'd like to start a little meme here.

If you're happy about Mollom, just shout it out on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, ... by putting up a screenshot of your stats and saying how many spam has been caught by Mollom. You can find the stats of your site on your Mollom account. If you're using Drupal, you can find them under Administer > Reports > Mollom Statistics.

If you're using Twitter, use the hashtag #mollomstats. I'm looking forward see how much crap content Mollom has spared us from.

I'll give the example by being the first...

I'll even say it once more: "Drupal's Webform module has Mollom support". And I'm not talking support by patching here, but support like "just install Mollom and Webform and eat your ice cream". And boy, we've all waited for this for some time.

To take advantage of this integration, you will need to install the upcoming 3.0 release of Webform. Although this one is still in beta, that shouldn't stop you from using it. The counter is already at BETA-5 at the moment of this writing.

I love Mollom. It keeps away practically all spam from my sites. If you have no idea yet what Mollom is, you definitely have to check it out for all your anti spam needs.

But it really bugged me that there was no support yet for the Drupal webform module. That's a module I use on pretty much all of my sites to create contact forms and other.

So I decided to roll up my sleeves and add this feature myself.

Since the Drupal Mollom module isn't built with hooks (or any other modular system), I had to alter the Mollom module itself. This resulted in a patch which you can all download in the issue queue for the Mollom module.

Head over there to download the path and start your testing engines.

A few weeks ago, Dries Buytaert, together with Benjamin Schrauwen, two fellow (ex-) researchers at the University of Ghent (Universiteit Gent) founded Mollom. Mollom is a web service that helps you protecting your site from spam.

Mollom can be used on any website, but since Dries is also the founder of Drupal, you could expect a Drupal module would be offered soon. And so it is. A Joomla module is offered too.

This makes it very easy and fast to install Mollom on your Drupal website. I think it took me no more then 5 minutes.
You first register for a Mollom account where you can add your sites (yep, multiple) to your account. You then get a public and private api key. After you have installed the Mollom Drupal module, you just have to enter both keys, choose which forms to protect, and you're all set.

In the following graph you can see how many spam messages Mollom has blocked during its first week on this site.

Let me finish by saying that Mollom is free during the beta period, but a fee might be charged (if you're using a very popular site) after the release.