Well, the comment spam arms race continues. I have installed a captcha system which requires that you transcribe a numeric value from an image into a text box before your post will be posted (or even accepted). In addition to foiling spammers for a little bit (remember, when your party is being chased by a dragon, you don’t have to outrun the dragon, you just have to outrun the hafling), it will allow your posts to be placed online immediately without being moderated.
This system does have it’s drawbacks, most notably that you have to type in another thing before posting, but more concerning is that I am preventing anyone using a non-graphical browser (text, aural, etc.) from posting to my blog. It is unlikely that this will actually effect anyone, however it does bother me in principle as I try to develop pages that are fully accessible. But in this case I feel the benefits outweigh the problems and to a certain extent my hand has been forced.<p>
I am sure that spammers will get around this eventually. I have seen it happen before. When I initially moved over to [Wordpress](http://wordpress.org/) from [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.org), I saw a drop in blogspam. Then they caught up. I renamed my posting script to stop the hard coded bots who used the default script names. They updated their bots to parse the actual blog entries to find the posting script. So I know that the spammers will eventually catch up, but hopefully this will last a while. Next step is probably forcing the client computer to do math that takes a few seconds to process (i.e. [Hashcash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash), [Hashcash 2](http://www.hashcash.org/)).