General

Although Mollom uses the state-of-the-art in spam detection technology, it is still possible that a spam message will get through now and then.

If this happens, we ask you to submit this to the Mollom service (a simple click of the "mark as abuse"). Mollom will learn from this information and instantly adjust its filters.

Because all Mollom users can do this, Mollom can learn new spam patterns very quickly. By clicking "mark as abuse", you are making sure thousands of other users will never see the spam you just marked (note that it takes more than one person to mark it as spam before Mollom considers it spam).

If Mollom is not certain whether a post is ham or spam, it will answer "unsure," and we present the user with a CAPTCHA challenge.

A human user can easily solve it and the content will be accepted, while automated spambot scripts will fail this test and be blocked. This "gray zone" allows us to use much stricter content filtering and still be sure that human users will be able to post their content.

See this "The science behind Mollom: Spam vs. Ham" blog post for more information.

Mollom uses a next generation, two-stage spam-filtering protocol. If Mollom's intelligent text analysis filter decides that some content is suspicious or if it is unsure whether the content is ham or spam, it asks the user to solve a CAPTCHA challenge before allowing the posting.

This challenge/response procedure will never block human users, and it allows us to set very tight spam filters and prevent almost all spam from getting through.

On a software level, there is also no "markHam" API call, making the service much more robust. A markHam call could allow spammers to trick users into marking spam content as ham. See this "The science behind Mollom: Spam vs. Ham" blog post for more information.

It may also be helpful to read through the tutorial for the Mollom Drupal client.

We currently support clients for Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Radiant, and SilverStripe. Developer libraries for Java, Ruby, Python, .NET and PHP5 are available, implementing our open API.

If we don't already have a client available for you, our developer documentation can help you integrate Mollom into your favorite platform. See our download page for the latest list of our supported systems.

Currently, the Mollom service is an advanced spam filter, a CAPTCHA server and it provides a basic content quality score (in Beta). Many more features are on their way in the near future. To learn more about Mollom, it may be helpful to read through the tutorial for the Mollom Drupal client.