I signed this website up for the Mollom service primarily as a way to reduce 'spam' messages in the user forums (i.e. -- the area of the website you're reading right now...). Since this isn't a very high-traffic site, it qualifies for the free service, which fits very well with my budget.

I subscribe to a few different mailing lists and visit some user forums, and they seem to be a somewhat new but popular target for spam. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but a good many forum spam messages have been blocked by Mollom in the last month.

I also wanted people to be able to leave comments or questions for the articles I've written, and I set it to allow anonymous comments which have to be approved by the moderator (i.e. me). Due to the nature of this website and the articles, I didn't necessarily want those comments to go through the Mollom 'filter', as a means to respect commenters privacy.

However, In the last 3-4 days, the spammers have discovered the comment area and I've had to delete about a dozen 'comment spam' messages. So I decided to also set it so that comments as well as forum messages go through Mollom, rather than having a 'captcha' authorization only for the comments. I've revised the privacy policy below to reflect the change. Please feel free to visit the Mollom web site and look at their privacy policy, the links are below.