But there has to be something more nuanced than just thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. And so...

But there has to be something more nuanced than just thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. And so...

More Noise to Signal.

Mollom, the spam-filtering startup that eliminates comment and post spam on popular content management systems, just reached two important milestones: it processed 100,000,000 messages and is now actively protecting over 10,000 websites.

Even more impressive is that these statistics are for Mollom's public servers only and don't include message processing on private servers operated for large-volume clients, such as Netlog, an online social portal for European youth.

Mollom set up dedicated servers in Netlog's data center to provide automated around-the-clock monitoring and custom-trained content classifiers. Mollom's servers analyze more than 50 messages per second for Netlog, adding up to an additional 4 million messages per day that are not counted in the latest milestone.

Large sites such as Netlog are turning increasingly to Mollom for its ability to filter spam in near real-time. Another site, popular citizen journalism hub NowPublic, had been receiving almost 25,000 spam posts per day before implementing Mollom's service. After NowPublic installed Mollom, the number of legitimate comments by users jumped 180%, while spam comments fell to nearly zero.

Taking into account the traffic from the 10,000 websites that Mollom protects, Mollom currently processes up to 150 million messages a month, making it one of the largest website spam filtering services available today.

But Mollom is not content to rest on its past achievements. The company is currently changing the architecture of its back-end, which will make the software learn faster and make its actions easier to debug, analyze, and oversee.

Mollom offers its services in tiers, with products targeted at small blogs, mid-sized sites, and large enterprise-level Web properties. Mollom Free, designed for small blogs and sites with small posting volumes, is provided free of charge to the Web community, while Mollom Plus and Mollom Premium are commercial services designed for sites with higher volumes and reliability requirements. More information about its service plans is available on Mollom's website.

The Web is changing. In today's world, user participation can make or break a site. Allowing users to react, participate, and contribute while keeping your site under control can be a huge challenge. If poor-quality content or spam hits your website, it can undermine your site's search engine listing, damage your brand and reputation, and degrade your visitors' experience. Good user-contributed content, meanwhile, can add a lot of value to your site, which translates into more activity, improved stickiness, and more and better monetization opportunities. As the Web continues to become more social, more websites will need a strategy to deal with spam and unwanted content.

The addition of these social features has brought the problem of spam. Two major challenges arise from trying to control website spam. First, visitors may lose their motivation to comment or contribute content because they are required so often to prove that they are human and not spam by registering. This erodes participation.

Secondly, whether visitors are asked to register or not, site moderation becomes more time-consuming and expensive. Website moderators have to scan comments and other content to find spam instead of interact with the community. And publishing companies have to pay for more site moderators to deal with all the spam on their sites.

NowPublic is a Vancouver-based news network that mobilizes an army of reporters to cover events around the world. During Hurricane Katrina, NowPublic had more reporters in affected areas than most news organizations have on their entire staff. NowPublic was up against as many as 25,000 spam attempts a day, so it needed a solution that would allow the site to grow faster and more effectively without being slowed by comment spam.

A year ago, NowPublic implemented Mollom, a Web service that protects blogs, social networks, and communities against spam and other unwanted content. Within 12 months, the company had become one of the fastest-growing news organizations in the world, with thousands of reporters in more than 140 countries. In addition to this growth in reporters, NowPublic saw an 180% increase in the average number of comments posted per month by users since implementing Mollom's spam-filtering service.

"Integrating Mollom in NowPublic's systems was quick and easy," says Michael Meyers, co-founder and CTO of NowPublic. "It took only a few hours, and the API service has been fast and 100% reliable. By the end of the first month, we saved more in-person hours alone than Mollom cost us for the year."

Mollom has prevented more than one million spam attempts since it started protecting NowPublic. But NowPublic uses Mollom for more than just comment spam. It uses it to identify bogus profiles, vet new account sign-ups, and protect forums.

Mollom, in effect, removed a major barrier to visitor participation for NowPublic, allowing readers to comment anonymously. "Mollom has been a critical ingredient in our success," adds Michael Tippett, co-founder and CMO. "It has allowed us to open our comments to anonymous users while limiting the ability of spammers to vandalize our site. This has helped us grow our page views and truly tap into the wisdom of crowds."

Mollom also allows NowPublic's website maintainers and editors to focus on providing content instead of removing spam. "Since NowPublic began using Mollom," says Jordan Yerman, NowPublic's Contributor Support Manager, "I've saved at least an hour per day dealing with spam in stories, profiles, comments, etc. Thanks to Mollom, I can be more pro-active than reactive. I have more time to engage and interact with our users."

Other major publishers using Mollom to protect their websites from spam are Sony Music, Warner Bros Records, Netlog, The Economist, Fox Interactive, and the New York Observer.

Visit mollom.com to download Mollom's spam filtering service for your website.