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    • Akismet
    Klint Finley
    August 14th, 2012

    Drupal Company Acquires Akismet Competitor Mollom To Kill Spam Dead

    Acquia logo

    Today Acquia, the company co-founded by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert to commercialize the open source content management system, acquired Mollom, a spam filtering service also co-founded by Buytaert. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Acquia CEO Tom Erickson tells me the Mollom service will continue to be available for non-Drupal users and pricing will remain unchanged. → Read More

    Robin Wauters
    July 9th, 2009

    Mollom Blocks Its 100 Millionth Spam Message

    Mollom, a spam prevention tool that competes with Automattic’s Akismet, has blocked a stunning 100,000,000 spam messages from appearing on websites, social networks and blogs since the product was introduced about 14 months ago.

    Given that the product has only been out of beta since September 2008, that gives you an idea of just how much junk travels the digital highways. According to Mollom… → Read More

    Leena Rao
    May 19th, 2009

    European Social Network Netlog To Use Mollom's Spam Filtering Tool

    Spam filtering tool Mollom, a competitor to Automattic’s Akismet, has struck a deal to filter messages and comments for Netlog, one of Europe’s fastest growing social networks. Mollom will be filtering more than 4 million messages in over 25 languages for Netlog, which has 40 million worldwide users.

    Mollom says that it has set up dedicated servers within Netlog’s data center to enable… → Read More

    Erick Schonfeld
    January 27th, 2009

    Websense Acquires Spam Blocker Defensio

    Website security software company Websense has acquired Defensio, a comment spam blocker used by blogs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    Defensio competes with Akismet, the spam blocker that comes with Wordpress, and Mollom. One of Defensio’s features is that it can sort blocked comments by spamminess and also offers an API for use on Websites other than blogs.

    Websense will incorporate… → Read More

    Michael Arrington
    May 29th, 2008

    TypePad AntiSpam, A New Open Source Comment Spam Fighter

    Blogging infrastructure company Six Apart is launching a new free open source product this morning into beta called TypePad AntiSpam. While the product is new, the technology behind it has been used by Six Apart since May 2007 on millions of hosted TypePad blogs. Now they are offering it as a web service for other blogging platforms, too. TypePad AntiSpam is clearly aimed at Akismet, a similar… → Read More

    Greg Kumparak, Contributor
    April 20th, 2008

    Mollom May Soon Offer Serious Competition To Akismet

    Mollom is a new blog spam prevention tool that’s shaping up to be serious competition to Automattic’s Akismet, the current market leader. Belgium based Mollom was founded earlier this year by Dries Buytaert, the founder and project lead of the Drupal project and Benjamin Schrauwen, a Post-Doc researcher at Ghent University and Machine Learning expert. Mollom automatically blocks… → Read More

    Michael Arrington
    March 17th, 2007

    TechCrunch has 15,000 Spam Comments Per Day

    On January 4 we reported that the Akismet filter had stopped a million spam comments from reaching TechCrunch. At that point we’d been using it for about nine months. The number of blocked spam comments is now two million, just ten weeks later. That works out to about 15,000 spam comments hitting TechCrunch every day. If we did not have Akismet, we couldn’t allow anonymous commenting… → Read More

    Michael Arrington
    January 4th, 2007

    Thank You, Akismet

    I named blog spam catcher Akismet as one of the products I couldn’t live without in a post a few days ago. Today we hit the magic number – Akismet has captured over 1 million spam comments and trackbacks, just on TechCrunch. That’s over 1 million pieces of bogus content that we didn’t have to read, sort through manually and delete. Akismet is a relatively easy plugin to… → Read More