xtcian

Why does someone even do that in the first place??? That's maddening!

Lee, Because it's cheap and easy to do, and they are getting enough people who actually fall for these to make it worth their while. I have a friend with an advanced college degree and a pretty good brain* who actually fell for the "Nigerian" scam

http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/nigeria.asp

and had taken funds out of her retirement to buy into for this. But we were at lunch and she told me about it, and I was thankfully able to keep her from following through. In short, these spams get enough result to make it worth doing.

*On the other hand, she voted for Bush twice, so...

there is a similar problem with phpBB boards - spammers register by the dozens. The solution was instead of using captchas, it uses a series of photos that computers can't differentiate - for example it shows 5 photos and you must pick which are dogs and which are cats. Seems to work well.

wonder if it could be adapted for the blog world with an IP whitelist of approved commenters?

Death to spammers.

WTF is a captcha?

cullen - here is a description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

You mean like, "To help prevent spam, type the words you see" --dook blows
--rat K
--puke u.
--et al.

Never knew what those spaminators were called; sounds like you need a bigger, better bug zapper.

and yet another thing i learned from your blog - definition of a captcha. i always wondered why those things popped up on ticketmaster and the like.

Mean people suck.

Hey, I see my ol' buddy Diflucan left a comment.

Meh -- this is way beyond annoying, Ian. What a pain.

i assume you know about akismet? that seems to catch the bulk of it for me, but you probably get a lot more visitors than i do...

I've gotten pretty adept at adding common phrases to moderation keywords list; that filters them to the junk mail at least, where I can scan them and hit the "empty junk mail" button at one swing.