Mollom, a content management system plug-in designed to block comment spam and junk user accounts, has had a good few weeks. It just announced the release of a WordPress plug-in, following closely on the heels of Joomla support earlier this month.Add to that native Drupal support (Mollom was co-created by Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal), and you've got a solution that makes a big splash and offers a lot of flexibility.

Here's a succinct description of how the solution works from the Mollom site:

"When a user posts a comment or other content to your website, your web server sends this content to Mollom for evaluation. Mollom tells your site whether it thinks the content is spam and gives it a quality score. Your web server then decides to allow or reject the content based on quality guidelines that you set. Piece of cake!"

In addition to aforementioned support for Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, developer libraries exist for a number of languages, including Java, Ruby, Python, Microsoft .Net, and PHP5. A determined developer should be able to take advantage of these to include Mollom support in relevant applications.

We discussed Akismet and TypePad AntiSpam, two similar solutions, a few weeks ago, but these most recent plug-ins really put Mollom right into the middle of the fray. Although I haven't yet seen anyone set up an independent spam-blocking showdown between these three, I'd love to see the results.

Mollom is still in public beta, but you can download it and try it out now. It's a good time to be in the market for an automated spam-blocking solution, as Mollom, Akismet, and TypePad AntiSpam are all inexpensive (or free) and worthy of evaluation.