ShutterFreak!

Opening up a public website to allow people to comment is a risky endeavor nowadays. Vandalism and ‘blog spam’ can be very labor intensive to cure after an attack. Fortunately there are a couple products and services that help in fighting this Digital Evil through machine parsing.

Apart from Akismet you may have heard of Mollom, a Software as a Service (SaaS) that provides protection against spam to your website. There's a free edition for smaller, noncommercial and low-traffic sites; if you run a bigger site then you can choose between a number of licenses. One nifty feature of Mollom is that it integrates with OpenID in that it can act as an OpenID reputation service: it checks the reputation of an OpenID identifier while it tests a message for possible spam content.

If you want to read more about Mollom, read the following article:

• CMSWatch.com (11-Jun-2008): Trends: Drupal, Mollom, and the Future of Blog Spam