Mollom

» see mollom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Most spam filters make a binary call and are wrong often enough that you notice. Mollom added a third answer to the two everybody else had, which was not sure. Confident decisions happened silently in both directions. The uncertain ones produced a CAPTCHA, so the irritating part of the system only ever appeared inside the narrow band where the classifier had no opinion. If you posted like a person, you were mostly never asked to prove it.

Dries Buytaert wrote the first version in 2007 as a filter for his own blog. He had already created Drupal, which by then was running a serious share of the world's content-managed sites, and he had read The 4-Hour Workweek and wanted to know whether software could be built that ran itself while he did something else. Benjamin Schrauwen, a machine learning professor at Ghent University, came in as co-founder. They put in eighteen thousand euros of their own money and launched publicly on 31 March 2008.

The architecture was roughly a decade early. A REST API, a decoupled administration backend, the services split apart, and a classifier that learned continuously from the whole network rather than from one site at a time. That last part was the actual advantage: a spam run hitting one small Drupal blog in Belgium taught the filter protecting sixty thousand others. It handled around a hundred requests a second in normal traffic and three thousand at the peaks, run by two people.

By 2011 it was making €250,000 a year in recurring revenue at gross margins above 85 percent. Sony Music ran on it. So did Stanford. Acquia, the company Buytaert had also founded to sell Drupal commercially, bought it in August 2012, and by then it had already stopped its billionth spam message.

The problem Mollom solved is one I only ever saw from the wrong side of the login. The Turkish boards I was on through the 2000s, donanimhaber and frmtr, where I put more care into a signature listing my hardware than into anything I actually posted, all had the same disease and the same cure: a moderator awake at an unreasonable hour deleting the same pill advertisement for the fourth time that night. Nobody I knew treated that as a solvable problem. It was weather. Mollom's proposition was that the weather could be bought off for a few euros a month, and it turned out to be right.

~ the record ~

~ a profitable thing switched off ~

Acquia posted the end of life notice on 27 April 2017, stopped selling new subscriptions on 1 May, and shut the service down on 2 April 2018. The stated reason was that it no longer fit where the company wanted to put its resources, which is honest as far as it goes. Acquia sells large Drupal deployments to enterprises. A self-service API charging small sites tens of euros a month is a different company wearing the same badge, with its own support queue and its own way of finding customers.

The awkward number is that Mollom was never losing money. Buytaert has written about it since as a success on every measure he set for it at the start. It was switched off for being small rather than for being broken, and being small inside a larger company is a terminal condition that has nothing to do with whether the thing works or whether anyone is still using it.

~ the inheritance ~

Fifteen billion blocked messages over ten years is a number nobody can feel. What transferred was the design. Akismet had been doing the same job for WordPress since 2005 and outlived it comfortably, and the three-way decision Mollom made normal, where the CAPTCHA is a fallback for uncertainty instead of a toll gate everyone pays, is now how every serious system works. Cloudflare Turnstile and reCAPTCHA v3 both score you in the background and only interrupt when the score comes back bad.

The sites running on it had eleven months of warning and mostly moved to Akismet or to a honeypot module that costs nothing and works surprisingly well. The self-hosted forum, which is the thing Mollom existed to defend, was already emptying out by 2018 into Facebook groups and Discord servers, where the moderation problem belongs to somebody with a contract.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »