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Having to wade through 60+ spam comments a day on a WordPress blog (with all the stock antispam options enabled) just sucked . . . and the blog didn't even get much traffic (PageRank of 4). I installed the AuthImage plugin and used it on its stock settings, and for awhile didn't get a single bit of spam. Then, magically, it started up again. It seems some industrious little script kiddies have written a crawler to massively bombard AuthImage-enabled blogs with words from the stock word list. I switched from the wordlist file to randomly-generated strings and increased the size of the image for readability, and I never had another piece of comment spam in that blog again.

As for blind folks, I suppose every webmaster has to make that decision based on their target demographic, but I've seen a few text-only captchas that work well enough ("What color is an orange?") but will inevitably have the same limitation as the AuthImage word list above.

You seem kinda familiar, but I can't quite remember how...

My WordPress blog used to get the same sort of spam (advertising the same crap, nonetheless) until I installed the AuthImage plugin. It's stopped the spam completely without requiring me to keep a blacklist updated or forcing my friends to create accounts just to leave comments. It isn't a perfect solution (it's not accessible to blind visitors), but since virtually no one other than sighted friends reads my site, it works for me.

If you install a captcha such as AuthImage (the only one I've gotten to work), the comment spam really drops down to null. You kind of have to hack it in there -- I do wish plugin support was better -- but it does work quite well.

Amen to Wordpress. Using that and the AuthImage plugin, which requires commenters to type in a code displayed on an image (like Wil uses, although his is with MT) has been a GODSEND.

The solution is to impliment authentication images, much like paypal or the like use when you register. It generates some odd-looking image with a few characters and digits in it, and you as the user have to type it in.

There is a system like this for wordpress called wp-authimage that works quite well. You do have to know a bit of php and it requires GD on your websever, but neither of those things are super-difficult. I used it on a blog I run with some friends and it works quite well. Our comment spam went from 100+ per day with MT to 0 with wordpress and this system.

Reminds me of the design I should have submitted.