We are Fighting Spam!

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It happens to all websites - visits from spam bots and spammers trying to post spam or send it through other forms.
When it first happened to us, we've implemented CAPTCHA (word verification) that many sites use.  Visitors had to complete the CAPTCHA before sending a message or adding a comment.  This system worked great against spam bots, but not necessarily against spammers.  Sure, we can always block such person from visiting our site again, but we did not like the fact that the message was sent and a member received it.  In addition, we were not happy with the fact that ALL visitors had to complete the word verification (CAPTCHA).
Last week we have implemented a new filtering system in order to avoid and block such messages - Mollom. If a message triggers the spam filter, it will not be sent.  Most of the time there will be no CAPTCHA challenge for the visitor to complete.  CAPTCHA will only appear if the filtering system is not completely sure that the submitted comment / message is spam (or completely sure that it's a good content).

We are happy to know that most of our site visitors will never have to bother with CAPTCHA.
That being said, no filtering system is 100% perfect.  It can happen that a spam message will go through or a legitimate message will not be sent.  Members can report unwanted messages that they received by following a link attached to each e-mail sent from our site.  Legitimate comments that did not go through will be registered as well, so the filtering system can be improved with time.

Mollom is currently protecting over 40,300 active websites. The average efficiency is 99.92%. This means that only 8 in 10,000 spam messages were not caught. According to their statistics, Mollom has caught 386,384,292  spam messages since it started. Yesterday alone Mollom caught 444,550  spam messages. On average, 90% of all messages are spam.

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