One of the sites I help manage has been over run with World of Warcraft spam in recent weeks. It has been relatively easy to ban email addresses of offending users, remove the comments, and move on. Add to that, use of Captcha, and the Spam has been kept in check.

I don't want to actively manage spam.

Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal) and Benjamin Schrauwen created Mollom. It is kind of Captcha on steroids. Mollom monitors the content being posted on your site and allows it through, blocks it, or confronts the user with a Captcha.

Mollom claims (as of today):

Mollom is currently protecting 4187 websites. The average efficiency is 99.72%. This means that only 28 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. Mollom has caught 7,989,577 spam messages since it started. Today we caught 13,040 spam messages. On average, 76% of all messages are spam.

So, how do you set up Mollom on a Drupal site?

1. Go to Mollom.com and set up an account
2. Download the module package (ensure you have the right version for Drupal 5 or 6)
3. Place the module package onto /sites/all/modules in your Drupal install and unpack it
4. On the Mollom site, click on "Manage Sites" and choose "Add Subscription"
5. Choose Mollom Free or Mollom Plus and fill out the form
6. This will add your site to the Mollom database and provide you with a primary and secondary key
7. Go back to your Drupal site and go to /admin/build/modules and enable Mollom
8. Go to /admin/settings/mollom and choose what kinds of content you want to protect

I've set Mollom up on a Drupal 5 and a Drupal 6 site. In the upcoming days, I'll be interested to see how much spam gets caught and how much time it saves me. Hopefully lots!