Hacking for Christ

Here's an idea: change the names on the form inputs. I don't think the spammers would put in the extra effort for a few edge cases when they can just hardcode everything in.

A gentleman by the name of Adam Rosi-Kessel, whose blog I regularly read, employs a Turing test in his blog comment system that he claims is very effective. All it entails is adding an extra form element to the page that says "Don't put anything in here", and then trashing any comments that fail to follow the instructions. Spammers and spam bots will invariably fill out every field because they think it will help them spread their message. It's pretty clever, really.

Maybe it is time to switch to an open source blogging platform. Wordpress? With the free (but not open source) fantastic service Akismet.

I can second the WordPress suggestion. It's not perfect (nothing is), but it sure is nice.

C'mon, Gerv, join us, wordpressers, Aksimet made me that I didn't see spam for a long time :)
If you don't want Aksimet, you still have zillion other plugins. :)

The technical ideas are all very well, but they require access to change the server-side scripts, which I don't have.

I'd like to move to Wordpress (because it is free software), but last time I looked into it, 1.5 had just been released and there were very few skins available. Perhaps it's time to look again.

There are tons of themes available now. This list is a good starting point. And of course, you can build your own. You might also want to check out this documentation on Importing from Movable Type. Maybe the decision is with the Mozillazine people, but I'd think they would be into the open source thing.

I never believed in the Nofollow trick and desactivated it in my blog code.

Did you try Dotclear for a blog ?

I'm not totally sure who's blog I saw it on, but on a blog, I saw this as an anti-spam feature: 96+21 = . You had to solve a simple addition problem, and put in the right answer. Not sure if it is available for your blogging software, but if it is, give it a try.

Wordpress' community has grown and matured since Wordpress 1.5, as has the development team.

Sue Gardner [1] during her Northern Voice session on Blog Design for Everyone [2] commented on the large quantity and quality of Wordpress themes (skins).

There are a number of sites dedicated to spotlighting good Wordpress themes.

http://gerv.wordpress.com/ is available ;-) Other prolific bloggers have just left their previous blogs behind. [3]

Links:
[1] http://www.buzzmarketingwithblogs.com/member/1/
[2] http://2006.northernvoice.ca/speakers/blog-design-for-everyone
[3] http://scoble.weblogs.com/

Gerv: you have www.wordpress.com who can host your blog for free.

Another satisfied Wordpress user chiming in. :-) Themes aplenty (I'm assuming when you mentioned skins, that skins=themes): http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/theme_browser.php

And, yeah, like everyone else is saying who uses it, Akismet makes life better.