How's Mollom working out here?
If anyone doesn't know yet, the PortableApps.com forum is submitting posts to a third party to be machine-analyzed for spam, namely Mollom. When you go to make a post or even just a reply, there's a new link that says "By submitting this forum, you accept the Mollom privacy policy". Clicking the link basically explains what they're doing. In a nutshell, they'll save your post for two months with personally identifiable information, then for another 2 years without it.
No extra steps for the user, at least, I haven't triggered it. I don't think I'll try, don't feel like messing with it now. The site doesn't seem affected by it, in terms of speed, it checks posts so quickly you might not notice -- I don't. For John and/or any others with access, has it caught any spam yet? I'd be interested to know how it's doing.
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We're experimenting with it. We already use ReCaptcha (the handy open captcha service which actually helps people textualize old book scans and has accessible backups) for account signups, which blocks all the automated spammer account signups. Plus the fact that you need a valid email address.
So, of the rest, which are all 'manual' spammers, Mollom has blocked 34 spam messages in 4 days. It's missed two that I know of and Tim and I deleted them and submitted them for analysis.
We only get 100 messages per day since we're using the free version to try things out. The pay version is a bit expensive (US$558 a year) so use the free one and let messages through without using it after that.
I just switched it so all Mods and Devs now bypass Mollom so it will help stretch our numbers, too.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Sorry, I think 10+ of those were from me. I was trying to submit a post with a link to an image on imageshack.us
Seems like it doesn't like long links. I tried to see what was being blocked and resubmitted it about 10-15 times total.
Eventually I removed the link and clicked on preview. It worked, but the whole post was kind of pointless without the link.
Could this be fixed?
I didn't think anybody still used them. They were used for a lot of forum spam images for a while.
And if something is blocked and tells you its blocked, don't just keep submitting it. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Mollom just is. We have no way to change any of it. It's a closed-loop service. False positives have absolutely no workaround based on my reading of their site.
It's an experiment we're trying for a while. But it looks like we'll probably ditch it. With no way of fixing Mollom's mistakes, the service is rather annoying. It looks like groups.drupal.org was experiencing similar issues with false positives.
I honestly think it better to let a few spammers through (human spammers, since our registration captcha blocks bots) and have us deal with them than to have Mollom going off and blocking legit posts without us having any control over it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!