Mollom – an Excellent WordPress Spam Solution
January 1st 2009 – can you believe it? I thought I would start the new year as I mean to go on, and post about something useful, that you will find beneficial, especially if you blog, or look after the back end of blogs for clients.
Mollom spots high quality content and stops spam. It is an excellent solution for helping you get on with writing good content and not having to worry about the scourge of the web – spam adverts and comments! Hat tip to Anthony, who I met at The DO Lectures who told me about Mollom a couple of months ago. I’m now running it on most of my sites, and I’m very pleased with it. A little more info for you:
Mollom is a web service that analyzes the quality of content posted to websites. This includes comments, contact-form messages, blogs, forum posts, etc. Mollom specifically tries to determine whether this content is unwanted – i.e. “spam” – or desirable – i.e. “ham.” Websites that allow visitors to contribute or post comments are constantly being flooded with inappropriate, distracting or even illegal commercial messages, many of which are uploaded by automatic “spambots.” Mollom screens all contributions before they are posted to participating websites.
The nice thing about it? It just works. It’s a doddle to set up – you sign up, register your sites and for each site you get 2 keys – a pair. Then, depending on what platform you’re using, you can download a plugin. There are ones for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, plus developer libaries. Once you install the plugin, it has a very easy to configure options page where you add the appropriate keys and you’re up and running.
Here are the install instructions for WordPress:
Installing the Mollom WordPress plugin
- Go to Mollom.com.
- Login with your Mollom.com account, or create an account if you don’t have one.
- Select “Manage sites” from the upper right menu at Mollom.com.
- Select “Add subscription” to create a new key pair for your website (or “edit subscription” to access a subscription for an existing site tied to your account).
- Download the Mollom plugin (wp-mollom) from the project page or from Mollom.com. Drop the wp-mollom/ folder in /wp-content/plugins.
- Disable akismet or other spam-filtering plugins you are currently using.
- Activate the plugin in your dashboard.
- Go to the ‘Mollom configuration’ panel via the Settings menu.
- Enter the public/private key combination you got after registering with the Mollom service.
Simple eh? There are a number of options which you can then configure, but leaving them as they are works fine. Since installing Mollom, I’ve stopped using Aksimet (the spam solution supplied by WordPress), and have had zero spam. Yes, nothing.
So, if you would like a very competent and professional solution to help you spend less time mucking about with spam on your WordPress blog, then Mollom is for you.
