I just installed the [1] Spam Karma plugin for WordPress, in an attempt to cut down on the hundreds of spam comments that I had to moderate each day. Comments that look really like spam are automatically deleted, and comments that look suspicous are given a second chance by having the user fill out an image verification, or by verifying an email. Those logged in to a "Friend's Only" account are automatically approved. If you have any problems with this new system, please let me know.

Update:

Seems to be working well and automatically deleting spam, despite spammers trying to make their ads look like real comments by adding text between the links for porn, online casinos and cheap pharmaceuticals. Among the pearls:

• Sex-appeal is the keynote of our whole civilisation.
• Government has no other end but the preservation of property.
• No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
• Nobody before the Pythagoreans had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage. To non-European civilizations, the idea that numbers are the key to both wisdom and power, seems never to have occurred.
• Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.
• Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
• Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are bullies.
• In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and will never exist. It is against natural order that the great number should govern and that the few should be governed.