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Mollom: Dries' 3rd kid

31 March 2008 - 11:29pm — Larry

I've been meaning to upgrade the Akismet module on this site for a while now. Of course, I waited so long that another option just appeared, one I've been waiting to see for a while: Mollom.

The other other project from apparent insomniac Dries Buytaert, Mollom is a content filtering service similar to Akismet. I've actually been familiar with it for a long time, as the GoPHP5 project has been running a Mollom private beta since last June. In fact, when Acquia was announced my first thought was "wait, what happened to Mollom?"

Setting up Mollom was of course simple. (There's be a problem if it wasn't.) As a service, you sign up on the Mollom web site, install the Drupal module, enter your account key, and you're done. It even provides an integrated flash-based graph of activity. Nifty.

Given how successful Mollom was on GoPHP5 (node creation forms were open to the public on a high-profile site, and I don't think I saw more than one false negative, if that, during the entire project), I have high hopes that Dries latest endeavor will be a success. It's not quite perfect, though, so here's a little feedback, in no particular order:

  • I want to know what Mollom is a misspelling of!
  • The Mollom web site appears to be running Drupal 6 (surprise surprise), but curiously the CSS compressor is off. Why, guys, why?
  • OpenID enabled by default. Check plus.
  • The site key generation process does not happen over SSL. Check minus. :-(
  • Why is the Mollom settings page at admin/settings/mollom instead of admin/content/mollom? That's where I'd expect a content filter to be, under Content management.
  • Does it support trackbacks? Please say yes! I've wanted to re-enable trackbacks for a long time, but Drupal's trackback spam handling features have never been up to the task. It's the one thing making Drupal not a first-class blogging platform. If we can fix that, that's one more win for the blue guy. I will have to experiment and probably file a feature request. :-)

Dries, do you ever sleep? Or eat? Or... anything? Sheesh!

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Comments

1 April 2008 - 2:06am — Dries (not verified)

Mollom

Thanks for the feedback. We'll keep working on this and improving the service. Your suggestions are helpful. Bear with us -- we're only working on this so much so it might take a while (unless of course, you want to help and submit patches).

As for trackback -- I wanted to add trackback support but the trackback module did not sport and API/hook that allowed me to tap into the trackback module. We'll have to talk to the trackback module maintainers, if they haven't fixed that problem since. :)

1 April 2008 - 9:19am — Larry

Awesome!

Thanks, Dries! I figured you've been a wee bit busy of late. ;-) It's great to hear that someone else is also thinking of trackbacks. I've been missing those ever since I dropped WordPress.

... So what is Mollom a misspelling of?

1 April 2008 - 3:10am — Dries (not verified)

Compression

I enabled CSS and JS compression, by the way. :)