Bart,

As long as we do not make the distinction and call everything spam, we make it harder to find solutions. Mollom takes away the pain of what is typical spam, and that's why I am now only confronted with the atypical spam that is very targeted, takes effort to remove and some may even accept those comments as useful (or are being tricked into it).

What's even more, if Mollom does not make the distinction, I and others are making Mollom less effective because the atypical spam is diffusing the extremes.

Mollom gives me the following options:

• Don't send feedback to Mollom
• Report as spam or unsolicited advertising
• Report as obscene, violent or profane content
• Report as low-quality content or writing
• Report as unwanted, taunting or off-topic content

The problem is that in almost all cases I would indicate this is unsolicited advertising, and not (automated) spam. So I would split both categories and make a clear distinction between (automated) spam and (human) unsolicited advertising.

Some of those comments I deem low-quality or even unwanted. But the ones that are somewhat on-topic advertise something commercial or unrelated, are in the second category.

So maybe this is more a feature request for Mollom? I don't know whether it makes sense to make the distinction and what the impact now is of all the unwanted (human) comment spam I send to Mollom. But instead of making it bipolar (ham vs spam), I would make it tripolar (ham vs automated spam vs human spam).

This is actually a semantic discussion, but Wikipedia calls spam "unsolicited bulk messages", by that definition the comment spam I received would not even be spam because it is not in bulk.