Drupal’s Mollom Module Gets Makeover

NOTE: While Molom has been discontinued, we leave this blog posts here for historical and educational purposes.
 

If Drupal held an annual NBA-like All-Star Game for its modules, Mollom would be the LeBron James on the roster. And if you have yet to download and configure Mollom, then you just found out why your website hasn’t ever made the team.

Drupal’s Spam Blocker

The Mollom module is “a one-stop solution for all spam problems” and offers:

• CAPTCHAs - both image and audio
• Text analysis • User reputations Also, while not busy fighting crime, the module can:
• Block comment form spam
• Block contact form spam
• Protect the user registration form against fake user accounts
• Protect the password protect form
• Block spam on any node form, such as forum topics, stories, pages, and more

If your Drupal website allows anonymous users to post comments, fill out contact forms, or post in any other way, Mollom is a MUST. It is a piece of cake to set up, doesn’t require development knowledge, and is very non-intrusive. Sound familiar? There is even better news on Mollom, because a new version (1.11) has been announced with tons of new features that your Drupal site will want to have immediately! Check them out after the jump...

Dr. Drupal At Your Service

The Mollom module is actively developed and maintained by Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of Drupal, and Benjamin Schrauwen. It is used on over 20,000 sites, including Sony, Adobe, NBC, etc. That’s right, the Dr. James Naismith of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, is personally working his fingers to the bone to make sure that your Drupal site is free of spam.

In fact, Dries himself made a big announcement on his blog yesterday that the Mollom module got, in the words of popular television, a makeover.

Mollom Module Makeover

According to Dries’ update, Mollom hasn’t received any significant changes in a year... until now! Whammy! Mollom 1.11 release has been officially announced with some new features (that I generously borrowed from his post):

• Enables use of Mollom for any form; with Webform module integration almost completed
• Includes an embedded audio CAPTCHA player that works on all browsers
• Adds optional blacklist functionality to block spammers by text patterns and URLs
• Adds an optional link to Mollom's privacy policy from forms protected via textual analysis
• Adds support for serving CAPTCHAs over SSL (for Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium customers only)
• Makes Mollom compatible with Pressflow
• Integrates with CCK to change the position of the CAPTCHA field
• Provides many more unit tests for continuous integration testing
• Improves the APIs to enable module developers to better integrate with the Mollom module
• Implements various usability improvements (e.g., better permission names and better error messages)
• Updates several of the translations

Dries does mention that a Mollom upgrade requires some database updates and not to forget to run update.php.

Thank You For Your Attention

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