A Guide to Drupal eCommerce and Site Development

The Problem
For many eCommerce and company web sites, commenting is turned off and customer communications take place away from the public’s eyes simply because “the public” includes spammers and maturity challenged individuals who will post offensive and pornographic materials to a web site’s comments and anywhere else the site allows.

In some web sites, customer communications are limited to “5 star ratings” or canned responses in an effort to provide some means of customer feedback, without the possibility of undesirable messaging.

In another category of web site, customers have full commenting capabilities. These web destinations have a few approaches to combating unwanted material posted to their site:

1. They employ site moderators who review every piece of public contributed content before it goes online for the public to see;
2. Individuals can only post comments after they have registered with the site, If any spam or offensive material is posted through their account, they get kicked off the site and their post removed.
   • Note that this alternative results in the public seeing the offensive material before it is removed, as well as the site needs moderators to try to catch the offensive posts before they get out of hand.
3. The site employs various anti-spam and offensive language filters to comments before they appear online.

In actual practice, many organizations allowing public commenting combine all three options for a final semi-workable solution. A main problem with public comments is the dynamic nature of spam and offensive messages. Software filtering is only so smart, and needs to be able to learn new techniques on the fly as spammers and the immature make up new ways to pollute your site’s communications.

A Solution
The same people that created Drupal have also created an anti-spam and anti-offensive material software filter. Their software is artificial intelligence based, with the ability to learn new spam and offensive material techniques on the fly. It is not a perfect solution, but it works, it catches on average 99% of unwanted material, and it has a free version as well.

Mollom is the name of this anti-spam & anti-offensive material software filter. You can download the Drupal module here: http://drupal.org/project/mollom. The Mollom organization also supports other web CMS systems, such as Wordpress, Joomla, and others, as well as provides software library interfaces to their system for ten different development environments.

The Drupal version is all that will be discussed here, and that version is fully integrated into the Drupal environment.  Additionally, the Mollom system has great documentation. Because of their great documentation, I am not going to go into much detail here. The two links I provide above take you to rich information providing everything you need to know.

For those that want a quick summary, here’s how Mollom installs on your site:

1. You download and install the Mollom module on your site just like another other module;
2. You register your web site at the Mollom web site;
3. Upon site registration, Mollom provides you with two “keys”;
4. The “keys” are strings you paste into fields on your site’s Mollom administration page;
5. You configure the rest of Mollom settings, and you are done!

Mollom's basic settings page

Mollom’s form settings enable protection in the following ways:

• Comment protection:
  • CAPTCHA only
  • Text analysis with CAPTCHA backup
• Site-wise contact form protection:
  • CAPTCHA only
  • Text analysis with CAPTCHA backup
• User’s contact form protection:
  • CAPTCHA only
  • Text analysis with CAPTCHA backup
• User registration form protection:
  • CAPTCHA only
• User password request form protection:
  • CAPTCHA only
• Node edit form protection for every one of your site’s Content Types:
  • CAPTCHA only
  • Text analysis with CAPTCHA backup

As you can see, all the ways that a user (someone without administration page access) can add content to your site has Mollom as a gate keeper. Technically, how Mollom protection works is described very well on their site. 

That's it for this tutorial. If you have any questions or suggestions for improving this tutorial, please ask in a comment. All constructive critism will be followed to the best of my ability.