After several months of private beta testing, Benjamin Schrauwen and I are happy to unveil Mollom, your partner in automated content monitoring. Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server. We are experimenting with automated content quality assessments, but these are still in an early testing phase.

If you're interested in learning more about how Mollom works, check out the 'How Mollom works' page and visit the Mollom FAQs for more details.

We currently provide modules for Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. For all you developers out there who'd like to build Mollom plug-ins, we will be releasing full API documentation very soon. We would be thrilled to put your home-brew plug-in for your favorite platform on our download page.

Mollom vs Akismet vs Defensio?

Mollom does offer some of the same features as Akismet or Defensio, but our goal goes further than spam-blocking alone. We want to increase the overall quality of your site's content. For example, Mollom's CAPTCHA service already helps block fake user accounts, and we are experimenting with various automated content-quality assessments, including blocking obscene, violent and profane content.

We have some great new features in the pipeline, so please check back with us regularly for more news or subscribe to Mollom's RSS feed.

Mollom and Acquia?

Mollom is a self-funded, garage-style project. I do take it very seriously, but it is nowhere near the size or scope of Acquia, which obviously remains my full-time commitment.

Mollom is a separate effort for three reasons: (i) I started it a while ago, (ii) I'm working on it with a friend who is not involved with Drupal or Acquia and (iii) unlike Acquia, Mollom is reaching out to as many content management systems and web applications as we can engage (and not just Drupal).

While Mollom is not associated corporately with Acquia, Acquia does intend to offer Mollom services as part of its subscription offerings. See Acquia's Caliper project.

Thank you to our testers

We would like to thank all of our private beta testers for their help and suggestions over the past months -- you've gotten us to this important milestone, guys. Thank you!