Mollom

According to this BBC article, spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5 million spam e-mails sent. Even though their response rates are less than 0.00001%, big spam network generates more than $3.5 million USD in annual revenue. All it takes is thousands of hijacked machines sending millions of spam messages a day. Crazy!

We released new versions of the Drupal modules for Mollom. The most notable improvements are:

1. Usability: improved the usability of the CAPTCHAs.
2. Usability: better advertise Mollom's bulk operations to report spam from the node and comment admin page.
3. Usability: improved the error reporting.
4. Bugfix: made the internal management of the server lists more robust.
5. Bugfix: made audio CAPTCHAs work with Safari.
6. Bugfix: added missing t() function so that all strings can be properly translated.
7. Feature: added translation template.
8. Feature: added Hungarian and French translations for the Mollom user interfaces.

Mollom blocks spam from around the planet. To demonstrate this, we created "Mollom's World Map of Spam", a live updated map with the locations of the website spammers across the globe. The map shows both the attack frequency per country, and the individual locations of the spammers. Sweetness...

Postini has a similar map for email spam sources. There certainly is some correlation between the Postini map and Mollom's map, but it appears that website spammers tend to be geographically differently located as email spammers. A similar email spam based map is that of SpamShield.

The top website spammers can be found in the Netherlands, United States, Panama, United Kingdom, Germany, Russian Federation and China. This is quite unexpected, because for email spam, it is in Russia and China that the top email spammers can be found.

Notice that smaller countries such as the Netherlands and Panama only house a limited number of spammers, but these guys are very active, and even outdo all the spammers in the USA in volume.

I was featured on the infamous Lullabot podcast series. Jeff Robbins and I talk about Acquia, Mollom and Drupal 7. Check out the Lullabot podcast #65 if you want. The Mollom part starts around minute 25.

SilverStripe users rejoice because Dieter Orens created a Mollom module for SilverStripe, an Open Source CMS developed in PHP. The module is available from http://mollom.silverstripe.be. The module only implements Mollom's CAPTCHA service at this point. Thanks Dieter!