Keeping the heart of the Linux Community open online

Mollom is helping online communities thrive.  One in particular, Linux Journal, is using Mollom to grow its community.  With the help of Mollom’s spam protection, the folks at Linux Journal are able to focus their time on user engagement and not get bogged down with the time and burden of comment moderation. See below for more about how Linux Journal is thriving due to Mollom’s help.  

Launched in 1994 to nurture the burgeoning sense of community inherent among Linux users, Linux Journal wanted to provide a forum for its readers to share in the open-source operating system’s process of collaboration and exchange. Despite using a combination of CAPTCHA and spam filters during its early years, Linux Journal’s efforts to provide a secure communication channel that would reflect Linux’s commitment to an open exchange of ideas was being overwhelmed by spam. They even found themselves having to repeatedly shut down their comments for whole days at a time when they felt particularly under attack.

In October of 2008 Linux Journal decided to turn to Mollom to help create a simple, secure anonymous comment forum free of the cascading effects of spam that can cripple an organization. And according to Linux Journal Webmistress Katherine Druckman, “Implementation was easy. I just installed the module and it worked.”

Through its collaboration with Mollom, Linux Journal has been able to grow its community through increased visits and a corresponding increase in anonymous posts resulting in more frequent interaction between those members. With 15 years of archived material, articles views for older articles can surpass one million. Most new articles can generate 5-20k hits with more popular ones pushing 50-100k fairly quickly in the first two weeks to a month after the article is published. Almost every article generates at least one comment with most receiving between 10-200. Keeping those comments pertinent to the article being discussed is critical to generating continued conversation.

Since installing Mollom, Druckman notes that on an average day more than 95% of spam is filtered. “Over the last year there have been many days when Mollom has blocked almost 10k spam attacks per day.”

Annually, the amount is more than 1.5 million messages. While spamming can still pose a threat, bulk spams slip through far less frequently.

In using Mollom to manage forum topic submissions, contact forms, user registrations and comments, Linux Journal has been able to focus its energies on promoting its mission and the positive interactions it inspires. Druckman believes Mollom frees the Linux Journal staff from having to continually monitor spam lists for false positives, allowing them more time to constructively interact with the community. Focusing less on capturing spam and more on initiating constructive discussion to continue to grow their Linux community, the time spent monitoring those comments is now a positive expenditure and no longer a financial liability.

The Industry Standard, Comment Protection and User Engagement

Want to read about how spam comment protection is being used by digital media to increase user engagement? Here is a great example  of how The Industry Standard tackled their problem and used Mollom to stop comment spam to increase user engagement.

The online media industry continues to face readership and revenue challenges. The online media are burdened with the task of not only providing the content but gaining more user interaction in the form of reader comments. Comments by readers are beneficial to sites because they show created readership and mean more eyeballs to that particular page or article. More eyeballs means greater opportunity to sell ads and the more ads that are sold, the more revenue that site makes from the content it generates.

When you want to be relevant to readers and advertisers, you want to offer relevant content that is on topic. You want meaningful comments and conversation where possible.  What you don’t want is comments that are crude, insensitive and not relevant to the content created, you don’t want spam as comments.

The Industry Standard is a news and analysis site about technologies such as online collaboration and social networking tools that are not changing people’s lives, but also the way in which they do business.  Based in San Francisco, the Industry Standard is popular with online readers all over the country.

The Industry Standard had site re-launch in 2008 with the goal of engaging with new readers and encouraging them to contribute comments and content. They also wanted to allow readers to comment anonymously, something that most news sites do not do. The Industry Standard felt that anonymity gave readers more freedom to express their comments, and would encourage more frequent and detailed commentary while expanding traffic and tying the publication into the many other online conversations taking place around technology.

Ian Lamont, The Industry Standard’s managing editor, had experience managing online communities, and knew that the relaunched publication would need a comment filter that could encourage quality comments while sifting out spam and trolls.

According to Lamont, having anonymous comments is huge issue for The Industry Standard. “We really believe that most people don’t want to deal with the hassle of registration. Because we are relatively small, if we only had registered comments, there would be far less reader engagement on the site. As it is now, we can have dialogues with unregistered users, which is really important to building voice and an online identity.”

The Industry Standard turned to Mollom to help them remove the barrier to visitor participation, allowing readers to comment anonymously and eliminate spam vandalism. Since the re-launch in 2008, Mollom has blocked 800k spam messages in 539 days and blocked more than a thousand attempts a day with peaks up to several thousands a day.

“Our user engagement immediately went up after anonymous comments were enabled with Mollom,” said Lamont.  “We were able to have many great discussion threads that otherwise would not have been possible.” To illustrate, here is an example of a discussion thread with anonymous comments: http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/oil-prices-spike-150-barrel-july

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.

– JLH

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Tags: Comment Spam, Industry Standard, Mollom, The Industry Standard