"Word verification" to post a comment?

I personally get the Captcha on 50+% of my posts, but I'd rather that than 20 or so posts in quick succession every hour for rip-off shoes, or headphones, or viagra substitutes.

As spammers usually use links in their posts, I can understand that you have to solve a captcha if you add a link to your post. I only had captchas in my way if I was posting a link which fortunately isnt very often. But before their introduction, spam levels here were extremely high so I understand the decision.

We're currently using a combination of Mollom, SpamBot and GoAway BanList to handle spam. Mollom is a mult-site heuristic anti-spam system for Drupal that analyzes each message for content but also weights forum name and posting IP address. Mollom is the one that displays the Captcha, but unfortunately we don't have much control over who sees it nor can we disable it for internal links. It does learn as we report whether things are or aren't spam manually.

SpamBot compares the source IP to others that have been reported to StopForumSpam.com. It will outright block known spam sources. Unknown sources, we can report to SpamBot for future blocking.

GoAwayBanList allows us to manually block IP addresses. We do this for IPs that attempt to register a new account every minute, clogging the system. Since they are not making posts, they are often missed by Mollom and may not yet be in SpamBot (and we can't report it because it wasn't a post).

All together, we get up to 3,000 attempt spam attempts per day. Far more than folks used to see a couple years ago before we had spam filters and would occasionally get a spammer posting 100 or 200 spam messages overnight when the mods were asleep. It is a hassle to have to deal with the capcha, but unfortunately, this setup is our only solution at the moment.