Gadgetopia

Why not using captchas? They seem to be pretty secure.

I'm not sure why you're upset about requiring some additional verification from commenters. I think it's a perfectly legimate way to handle the spam problem, by ensuring that you've got a real person on the other end. In this day and age, anyone who is likely to comment on a post has to understand that spam is a real problem, and know that this is a completely resonable solution to it.

How hard would it be to try out Akismet? For a long while on my sites I used Spam Killer and similar filtering solutions on my server-side, but they'd tend to "age" and eventually I'd get a stream of spams that were under the system's radar. I gave up and started "outsourcing" my comment spam detection to Akismet for free. [By the way: Matt Mullenweg (of wordpress fame) is in charge of the project.]

How hard would it be to try out Akismet?

Pretty hard since we're not using WordPress.

Spam bites. Good luck, anything to ease the burden of spam is a good thing.

Why not using captchas? They seem to be pretty secure.

http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/

They may not be totally ineffective, but it would take a very strong one to be bested. However, it would most likely be a deterrent to most of the spammers...

I had to resort to captchas too, all spammers must hang. I hated to do it, because I prefer to keep my blog open and there are accessibility issues with using captchas, but it was either that or disable commenting entirely.

It would be nice if you added a "remember me" checkbox while you were at it.

I'm right there with you... I am DROWNING in spam of all sorts.

For the record, I installed it...but it didn't work. It evidently conflicts with some other plugin I have running.

I really need to disabled all my plugins and start over, I think. I don't think 90% of them are in use.

I'll debug it more later in the week.

As long as no human spammer is specifically targeting Gadgetopia, you can avoid a plug-in and just change the code to insert, and check for, one question manually. It will still block any automated attempts to post comments. Of course, you may be popular enough to warrant personal attention, in which case a random option out of a large variety will indeed offer more protection.

And, BTW, the sample questions on your post are really awful. "What color is an orange" is good, but the sky color can be blue, black, grey, dark blue, cyan, etc... And a wheel can be round, circle, wheel-shaped... These things should be extremely self-evident and easy for a human to answer.