Mollom – The Akismet Alternative?

If we were playing a game of Family Feud and they asked the question, What word comes to mind when you hear about WordPress and Spam? I bet Akismet would be the top answer. However, Akismet is not for everyone. There are alternatives and today, I’m happy to report that one of those alternatives has a fresh new plugin for WordPress built from the ground up. The service is called Mollom. Mollom is a service managed by Acquia, a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system.

The service works in a similar fashion to Akismet in that it scans messages such as comments and determines one of three things. The message is bad, the message is good or sometimes, Mollom is unsure. When Mollom is unsure of a message, it presents a CAPTCHA to the user and if they pass, the comment gets pushed into the moderation queue, if they fail, the message is automatically deleted. Bryan House of Acquia does a better job of explaining the process.

The system is built around the Software As a Service concept meaning you can use it on Drupal, WordPress, and more platforms in the future. However, I think one of the coolest features of Mollom is their Content Moderation Platform. Using their CMP, you can moderate multiple websites on different platforms from a single location.

While both Akismet and Mollom offer paid/free plans, Mollom’s plans are a bit more complicated to make sense of because of the additional features their service provides, such as the Content Moderation Platform.

I’m going to place the WPTavern site on the free Mollom plan and give the service a test run for a week or two. Once the test is over, I’ll report back my findings. I’d love to hear from anyone who is either already running Mollom in place of Akismet or will be joining me in testing out the service on their own site.

By the way, is comment spam synonymous with the colors green, black, and blue?