Jelle Druyts

My friend Dries Buytaert - known all around the world for creating Drupal (the wildly popular open source content management system) and Axl (the incredibly cute kid he co-created with my even better friend Karlijn) - asked me a few months ago if I had any trouble with spam on my blog... It turned out he was building Mollom, a solution for fighting spam and automating content monitoring, and was looking for beta testers. I immediately jumped aboard and implemented a .NET client API for his service and integrated it into dasBlog, the blog engine I'm using.

Now that Mollom and its API and developer documentation have finally been released (in public beta), I've packaged my client library as well and published it on CodePlex: see the Mollom for .NET homepage.

Mollom's purpose is to dramatically reduce the effort of keeping your websites clean and the quality of their user-generated content high. Currently, Mollom is a spam-killing, one-two punch combination of a state-of-the-art spam filter and CAPTCHA server.

I have to say it's working really well for me, I don't get any spam at all anymore through my blog, and the XML-RPC API that Mollom provides is easy and straight-forward to use. And, of course, if you develop on .NET then it's even easier to talk to Mollom using my client API. As a very basic sample, this should give you an idea of how easy it is to have Mollom classify a piece of content:

MollomClient client = new MollomClient(privateKey, publicKey);
ContentCheck result = client.CheckContent(postTitle, postBody, authorName, authorMail, authorUrl, authorIPAddress);
if (result.Classification == ContentClassification.Spam)
{     // Handle spam here...
}

All information, downloads and documentation is available on the Mollom for .NET homepage on CodePlex, so rush out and let me know what you think!