Mollom Leaves Beta, Hits 10 Million Blocked Spams, Launches Paid Plans

We initially reviewed spam prevention service Mollom back in April and I noted that it gave me back an hour a day because I didn’t need to spend as much time picking out the good comments in the thousands of spams we get a day. I worked with the Mollom team of Dries and Benjamin over the summer to get the plugin working correctly on CN. There were tweaks on both sides that needed to be implemented because of our cloud computing setup.

Since the kinks were resolved, Mollom has worked really well. It seems at this point that only Svetlana has issues posting comments from Russia – no matter what I’ve tried, I can’t get them to come through! Mollom has been working as well on CN with our Drupal setup as Akismet works on our Wordpress-based blogs.

Mollom has made three big announcements over the past week: leaving the beta period, hit 10 million blocked spams and their pricing model.

The pricing model is listed on the Mollom site and there are free and paid options. The differences are simple. The free account is limited to 100 blocked spams a day and there’s no uptime guarantee. The paid plan is $30/month 30 Euros/month and blocks up to 10,000 spams a day and has a more robust environment and support policy.

I don’t see many Wordpress users switching from Akismet to Mollom. I do imagine that with the right marketing plan, Mollom could do very well for a variety of CMS and blog platforms that don’t already incorporate a spam protection tool. Once the base is strong, then go after the platforms that have built-in spam protection tools.

We are going to remain on as a tester for Mollom going forward to provide feedback and a testing platform as they improve the service. My hope is that they will create hooks into other Drupal features like trackbacks – I sure would love to turn those back on sometime!

Update: Andrew has a good spam prevention comparison from earlier this year.