During the last few months we have been struggling with an increasing amount of spam. This caused a few problems including an important rise in resource consumption on our hosting server.
In order to tackle these problems, these days we made a few changes to our site. Except the usual Drupal engine upgrade and module update, we installed some new modules which prevent spam bots from accessing our site and verify messages to prevent spam. This led also to our Privacy Policy change.

Anti-Spam and Privacy Policy update

One of these anti-spam modules is called Mollom. This module is basically a web-service which analyzes and stores all comments and other personal details completed by our anonymous visitors for anti-spam and quality monitoring purposes. If Mollom is ensure whether something is spam or not, it asks the user to answer a CAPTCHA challenge. This challenge-response procedure will never block human users, and it allows us to set very tight spam filters and prevent almost all spam from getting through.

Your comments and personal details are stored so that Mollom’s intelligent filter technologies can learn from the spam information gathered on all sites using Mollom. This means that if another site gets spam, Mollom learns from it and protects our site better if that spam-wave rolls over us. Mollom uses so-called "crowd sourcing" or "community intelligence". The more users using Mollom, the better its performance and the faster it can learn. Your data is stored for a period of two months in their databases. After this period of two months, they will continue to store your data in anonymized way for a period of two years.

If you want to know more about how Mollom processes your data, please read the Mollom web service privacy policy. If you do not agree with this privacy policy, then please do not write any comments as an anonymous user.

If you have a registered account on our site, you can post comments freely and they will not be checked by Mollom. We have configured our site to check only anonymous comments using Mollom.

New Enhancements

Except implementing the anti-spam modules we have made some other changes as well:

• E-mail subscription service - we have enabled a feature which allows you to receive notifications via e-mail each time our site is updated. If you don't like RSS feeds that much, we are sure you will enjoy this service;
• Easy bookmarks & sharing - we have installed a module which allows you to easily bookmark or share each article on our site using a wide variety of services such as: Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Magnolia, Furl, Facebook, Google, Yahoo.

We are very happy with these changes and new features. We hope they will prove to be useful for our visitors as well. If you have any questions don't hesitate to leave us a comment.