Because finding the time to manage and update your own Web site is always a challenge, I finally just got around to making some updates to it over the weekend.... including, at long last, installing the Mollom module.

Besides rhyming with Gollum, the Mollom module is significant for helping to intelligently detect spam as its coming in to any fields (such as comments, contact field, etc.) that you designate on your site.

Why is this helpful? Well, if you're like me, you'd love the possibility of someone (another developer, a potential customer, a long-lost acquaintance) stopping by your site and leaving a comment. So, you enable comments. But, not being a simpleton, you of course turn on comment moderation.

And then you check your comment queue three months later only to find 4900+ comments waiting in moderation, and most likely every single one of them Spam. Now you're faced with the onerous choice: delete all the thousands of comments out of hand as Spam, or comb through them looking for the few possible real comments. What a pain.

This is where Mollom comes in. Developed by Drupal founder Dries Buyteart, Mollom is:

an "intelligent" content moderation web service. By monitoring content activity on all sites in the Mollom network, Mollom is in a unique position to determine if a post is potentially spam; not only based on the posted content, but also on the past activity and reputation of the poster. In short, Mollom handles incoming posts intelligently, in much the same way a human moderator decides what posts are acceptable. Therefore, Mollom enables you to allow anonymous users to post comments and other content on your site.

I've literally just started using it, but I look forward to seeing the results for myself.