Askimet, the blog spam prevention tool from Automattic, will soon find strong competition from a Belgium based company named Mollom, reports TechCrunch.  The service currently does not support Wordpress but is planning to provide it soon.

Mollom fights spam coming from comments form, contact form and fake user accounts using CAPTCHA and content analysis.  First of all, Mollom analyzes the content using text analytics and if it is not able to categorize the content as spam or not spam, it throws a CAPTCHA challenge to the user.  Mollom is a self-learning system which improves with user feedback about spam and allows for manually marking and reporting content as spam.  The system is 99.94% accurate in identifying and blocking spam as per the scorecard on the Mollom website.

The service is in public beta and free for use.  In future, the company is planning to provide advanced version of service to big and high traffic websites for a fee while keeping the basic service free for the smaller websites.

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