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How can I report incorrectly blocked ham?

There are a number of potential situations, that as the site administrator of a site using Mollom, you may occasionally experience. Sometimes, a questionable post may slip past Mollom's filters on to your site, though our statistics indicate this happens but rarely. Occasionally, you may have a user complain that Mollom rejects his comments outright; this is sometimes due to the IP being used by the user being blacklisted by a spam protection clearing house. And, occasionally, your site may not interact with Mollom's backend network properly, requiring technical support intervention.

When seeking support for what you believe to be a Mollom-related problem -- either spam has been improperly posted to your site, or a "good" comment has been rejected -- the first place to start is by leaving a support request at mollom.com/contact. The information you provide there is automatically filtered to our support tracking system, and various members of the Mollom support team will correspond with about your issue.

When you initially post about your support issue, be sure to mention the URL of the site in question, and provide details about the type of CMS (e.g., Drupal) and its version. Also provide information about what Mollom client is in use on the site, and whether any additional caching modules, accelerators or proxy servers may be in use. The Mollom support team may ask for your site's public and private keys, your username on Mollom.com, or other information.

To track down the circumstances involving the classification of a specific post, you'll need Mollom session ID information, recorded in the Drupal log by the most recent versions of the Mollom Drupal client (some older versions of the clients did not record this information, which will make it almost impossible to track down Mollom's interaction with a specific comment).

As an example, here are several examples of what Mollom recorded in the local Drupal log about comments it categorized as "spam":

Example 1:

Array
(
    [post_body] => radiation africa continues
    [author_name] => raedanafrica
    [author_mail] => raedanoafrica@example.com
    [author_url] => http://some-webaddress-we-don't-want-to-publicize-here.aspx
    [author_ip] => 65.212.213.40
)


Result:


Array
(
    [spam] => 2
    [profanity] => 0
    [quality] => 0
    [session_id] => 100730eba6dfd59ed3
)

Example 2


Array
(
    [post_body] => absolute frozen against references
    [author_name] => holtjksl
    [author_mail] => holtjksl@example.com
    [author_url] => http://some-webaddress-we-don't-want-to-publicize-here.aspx
    [author_ip] => 65.212.213.40
)


Result:


Array
(
    [spam] => 2
    [profanity] => 0
    [quality] => 0.014
    [session_id] => 100730fd9aea5a7de0
)

Note: Names, email addresses and ip addresses have been modified in the above example.

In regard to tracking down Mollom's disposition with individual comments, the logged information above is absolutely essential. Unfortunately, not all content management systems have robust logging tools, and the information recorded in those logs (where they exist) may not be standardized since the clients are written by different developers. Even within the Drupal community, only the last several iterations of the Mollom client has included all this information for each comment processed.

Regardless, if you think you may have an issue with Mollom that requires troubleshooting, please contact support at http://mollom.com/support.

When I have problem with Mollom, what information should I provide in my service ticket?

By using the contact form on Mollom.com, you can submit a trouble ticket for our support team. Please try to provide as much information as you think may be relevant to your particular situation. Note that you can also use this form for information about pricing/sales information, or if you have trouble logging into the Mollom.com website.

For technical support requests, it is very important that you provide us with with:

  • the name and version of the CMS platform hosting your Mollom plugin
  • the version of your Mollom plugin
  • the name of your website, or in some cases, your Mollom public key
  • and any debug information that may have appeared in the logs of your CMS about the issue. In particular, in some of the very latest Drupal plugins on the Drupal CMS, there is a "Mollom session ID" that is very helpful to us as we investigate service related issues. (If the Mollom session ID is not shown on your watchdog log in Drupal, try upgrading to the HEAD version of the Drupal 6-1--1 module. Extra logging has been added to this version, and will appear in future releases. In this module, the session ID is printed at the bottom of the watchdog entry starting with "Ham:", "Spam:" or "Unsure:".

Depending on your particular issue, our support technicians may ask additional questions (such as your version of PHP on your server, whether you can make outbound HTTP requests using PHP, etc).

I found a bug in a plugin; will you fix it?

We do maintain the Drupal module for Mollom, but are not responsible for maintaining other plugins. As a Mollom Plus subscriber, you pay for use of the Mollom web service, not for maintenance of the plugins. Obviously, though, it is in our own interest to make sure that the Mollom plugins work well, and we will assist you in bringing your bug to the appropriate plugin maintainers' attention.

Can you customize Mollom for me or help me integrate Mollom in my own CMS or site?

We do not currently provide professional services around Mollom. If there is no Mollom plugin for your CMS on our download page, we probably can't help you directly. However, Mollom is built around an open API, and can be implemented within most web services, content management systems and other web applications. We usually don't take a lead role in implementing plugins, but we do encourage CMS vendors, consultants and web developers to do so, and will assist with code reviews and troubleshooting via e-mail as time permits. For approved companies, our software and reseller partner program is also available. We recommend that you work with a service provider for your CMS of choice and that you connect them with us via our contact page.

Why are most clients open source and the back-end closed source?

Mollom is built around an open API, making it possible to implement it in a large number of CMSes and web services. We strongly believe in open source and have made several open source clients available. Our back-end technology, however, will remain closed source. Giving away the intelligence we need to detect spam, generate rock-solid CAPTCHAs and figure out the quality of your content could be turned against us and defeat our purpose. The code could be used to create malicious, unblockable content.