I have used the free Mollom plan to protect the forms on this site with CAPTCHA or text analysis. For the past few months, it has been working very poorly to be honest. Comment posts that were very obviously spam were getting though consistently and I have been removing 20-30 spam posts en masse about once a week.
I submitted a ticket when I first noticed this happening with Mollom support and got a quick reply, but after my initial replies the request was waiting a follow-up from them for quite some time (and twice, at that).
Today I got news that it was a service-wide issue and it has been resolved. Hopefully you will notice a significant reduction in spam posts! Honestly I am not very happy with Mollom at the moment and may look to other alternatives if this doesn't pan out, but then again it's a free service and it worked wonderfully in the past so I can't complain. You get what you pay for.
The issue was more that I was looking at taking 5-10 clients to their basic paid plan, but after my experience with their customer service I am hesitant to do so. As always, I guess time will tell.
Comments
Fixed
Hi,
Positive coincidence: Just as of today, we've identified and fixed a major bug in Mollom's content classifiers, which has been deployed to all servers. We expect a significant improvement with regard to the amount of uncaught spam posts that previously slipped through on various sites.
I'd recommend you to monitor the situation some more in the next few days. If you still experience too many uncaught spam posts on your site, please get in touch with the Mollom support team, to analyze why certain posts were not blocked, as this is not supposed to happen.
Thanks,
sun
Thanks
Thanks Sun, it has been MUCH better since this fix. Today I identified a few more comments following that consistent pattern, I have reported them to mollom issue #6231.
Cheers,
Stewart