Mollom
Mollom for Joomla
Right on the heals of the Wordpress plugin for Mollom, Markus Bopp got his Joomla extension for Mollom accepted into the official Joomla Extension Directory. It is great to see Mollom being adopted by more and more platforms. Thanks Markus!
Mollom volume segmentation
When people sign up to protect their website against spam with Mollom, they are asked to categorize each of their sites. So far, almost 2,000 Drupal sites have been categorized. The available categories are: a company website (22%), a site built for a customer (7%), a non-profit website (27%) or a personal website (44%).
Based on a sample of roughly 2,000 Drupal sites that use Mollom.
It is only one data point and a relatively small sample so I don't know if it is safe to generalize, but I figured it was an interesting nugget that could help us understand Drupal's install base.
Mollom for Wordpress
Matthias Vandermaesen released a Mollom plugin for Wordpress. You can read more about it on his blog or you can download WP-Mollom from the Wordpress.org plugin directory. Thanks for all the hard work, Matthias!
Jabber using Drupal
I've been meaning to blog about this for months. So in case you haven't noticed yet, our friends at Jabber are using Drupal for jabber.org. They are also using Mollom to protect their website against spam.
I still want my Drupal to talk to my Jabber. Think "Drupal → Mollom → Jabber/XMPP → instant messaging client" to get notifications about new comments or other important events, for a example. Lots of other XMPP-Drupal opportunities as well ...
Mollom in Jobat
I was recently interviewed by Barbara Vandenbussche for Jobat, a Belgian employment website with a weekly print magazine written in Dutch. The interview (PDF, Dutch) talks about Drupal, but also mentions Acquia and Mollom. It is the first time that Mollom was prominently featured in the printed press, and that needs to be celebrated with a blog post. Yay!
Photo taken by Joeri Poesen.
Website spam protection in the enterprise?
Kas Thomas, a CMS analyst at CMS Watch, published a great article on Mollom and the future of website spam:
"If you're in the process of selecting a Web CMS and/or Social Software vendor, and you plan to deploy public-facing blogs or wikis, be sure to take comment spam mitigation into account. Moderation of comments (by humans) is inherently costly. A SaaS service like Mollom or Akismet may not completely eliminate the need for moderation but could be money well-spent. One thing is certain: spam is something you need to budget for and architect around. Ask your vendors what kind of help you can expect from them. And don't settle for the sound of crickets chirping."
When at Gilbane last week, it was clear that nearly all enterprise WCMS vendors are working hard to integrate blogs, wikis, forums, tagging and voting into the core of their offering. Clearly, Web 2.0 is currently receiving the level of attention in the enterprise that it got in the open source world two years ago. Maybe by 2010, they'll have support for OpenID, oAuth, XFN, Twitter, etc. just like Drupal has today. ;)
Anyway, Kas Thomas of CMS Watch is right. Allowing users to react, participate and contribute while still keeping your site under control can be a challenge. Spam is something you need to budget for and architect around. At first glance, I don't think any of the vendors at Gilbane had a strong anti-spam offering, if an offering at all. In fact, I wonder if they understand the spam problem that is ahead of them now that they have begun opening the flood gates on user generated content.
At Mollom, we have a Mollom client API making it possible to integrate spam protection in your CMS and other web applications. The last couple of weeks, Ben and I have also been working on a Mollom reseller API that will allow vendors to seamlessly integrate Mollom into their SaaS offerings and eventually to become a Mollom reseller. You'll be able to create, update, delete and manage Mollom access keys without ever having to send your users to http://mollom.com/. The combined set of APIs should give more vendors access to anti-spam technology before 2010 ...
More about our reseller API later, but feel free to drop us an e-mail if you want to help beta test or become an early reference.
Mollom for Joomla
Markus Bopp of Crosstec created a Mollom plugin for Joomla. The plugin is code named Jollom and can be customized to protect any form. Welcome Joomla!