News
Acquia Acquires Mollom to Launch First Content Moderation Platform for the Enterprise
August 2012 by Marc Jacob
Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, announced it has acquired Mollom, a leading provider of content monitoring solutions for user-generated content. Mollom was co-founded by Benjamin Schrauwen and Dries Buytaert, who is the co-founder and CTO of Acquia, and the original creator and project lead for Drupal. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The acquisition will fuel Acquia’s continued momentum by expanding its offerings. Mollom’s technology is used by Twitter, Sony Music, Tuenti, Radian6, Thomson Reuters, Stanford University and more than 50,000 other web sites. In addition, Mollom’s analytics technology will enable Acquia to build the Internet’s first social content moderation platform, which will help both Drupal and non-Drupal users filter spam and other unwanted or damaging user-generated content from their web sites.
Since 2008, Mollom has blocked almost a billion spam messages, and 78 percent of all the comments on the sites it protects are spam.
Mollom helps organizations maintain the quality of user-generated content posted to their sites through sophisticated machine learning techniques, language analysis and a proprietary reputation system that evaluates and grades content and its authors. When a user posts a comment or other content to a protected web site, Mollom evaluates and scores it in real time based on quality guidelines set by the organization. Mollom incorporates honeypots to trap spam-bots, textual analysis to determine context, and CAPTCHA authentication. The software ’learns’ with each instance and has proven to be 99.96 percent effective at blocking spam.
Because Mollom was not built exclusively for Drupal-based web sites, the solution is suitable for any web site that has a social presence. In addition to helping organizations manage large volumes of user-generated content, the solution can also support workflow management for in-house moderation teams.
