People usually associate spams with unsolicited commercial emails that try to either sell you the “little blue pill”, or Nigerians phishing for your bank account details. There are many techniques fighting email spams, either at the server side or at your email client. However if you run a blog or a forum on the Internet, you would also have experienced fighting comment spams (unless, of course, that you run a spam blog yourself :). I have been blogging since 2001 and have employed various techniques to keep the spams at bay. Some of them worked well — at the beginning — but sooner or later spammers got smartened up and they can almost slip in a few spammy comments.

When I launched this blog 2 years ago, it was running Akismet for Drupal, and recently changed to Mollom, one of Dries’ startup company/project. It has been effective (except for the last few days). Mollom is sort-of similar to Akismet that it (1) uses a classifier to determine the likeliness of incoming comment being a spam (2) acts as a centralised database to collaboratively identify spams. Mollom does a few extra things when the comment is in a “not-so-sure” state, but discussing this would be beyond the scope of this blog post.