Site Security Upgraded With Added Mollom Support To Help Fight Spam

As WhiteWeddingPages.co.uk has continued to grow and grow over the last few months, with unprecedented volumes of traffic now arriving weekly to get the latest wedding discount vouchers and offers, the inevitable has followed... spam!

In recent months we have had to deal with a fair amount of spam or junk comments landing on pages across the site, but fortunately, as they are all monitored by our administrators and require approval before being posted live, the issue has been limited to just irritating our staff (and believe me, they ARE irritable). Likewise, user registrations and business information is completely secure, as it always has been due to the manual approval of such requests. Simple Captcha methods have begun failing over time, and upgrades to the software have only caused minor setbacks to these spambots. The Google reCapture service has served us well in more recent times, but the past 72 hours have caused us to really pull our hair out as we (and unfortunately a number of our valued users and clients) have been subjected to new and improve spambots which have circumnavigated our defences and begun sending the usual 'Viagra' emails, along with a few strange 'Gazebo' deals.

It became clear very quickly that OCR systems have improved dramatically and rumours continue to circulate of teams of humans (yes, humans) manually bypassing these systems so that annoying and embarrassing emails are flying around and into the inboxes of users everywhere. At one point, we did believe we may have to turn off the email contact forms on all of our businesses pages, which was certainly a last resort. That is until we came across Mollom.

Mollom has now been installed across a wide selection of forms and submission sections of our site to protect not only our sanity but also users and clients who have been subjected to these spam emails. We are pleased to announce that this temporary issue should now be well and truly solved. The Mollom protection service will now analyse the textual information of every single post, comment or email that is processed by WhiteWeddingPages.co.uk to seek out spam and profanity, stopping it dead in its tracks. Previous security systems relied on the system checking to see if the post was by a robot or human. The Mollom system now checks the information posted to determine whether the post is full of links, Viagra and any other topics that are not related to our service. If a post is deemed spam, it is booted straight into touch. On the off chance that the Mollom service is unsure about the post (poor spelling etc) it will offer fallback questions to determine whether the post can be trusted.

What's the best part? Mollom will continue learning all the time to ensure that new methods and techniques are weeded out before they become a problem.

So in a nutshell, we are sincerely sorry to any users who have had spam emails sent to them in the past few days, but are glad we can now say that we have an extra tough security measure in place.

For more information regarding Mollom, please visit www.mollom.com