We moved to allowing postings and comments by only registered users 3 years ago on our DIY renewable energy Scoop board, http://www.fieldlines.com/ Besides SPAM, we had many 'fringe' characters that insisted that it was illegal for the ADMIN to moderate out postings on a public forum where user registration was not required....these were all perpetual motion machine kooks, of course. They threatened to sue. We still have big problems with comment SPAM, and my research into the system logs discovered that it's not even computers doing it, it's real humans! So all plans for writing a PERL script that made users type in a string of characters obscured by graphics were dropped. The spammers have all been from China, they advertise Nokia phones and other gadgets (in a character set that no one in the US can even read) -- they sign up for an account, SPAM comments until the post throttle kicks in, get automatically warned by Scoop, then get banned automatically, and then sign up for a new account. All we can do to combat this is to set the post throttle very strict, apologize to legitimate users who were exceptionally verbose on a given day and re-instate their user IDs manually, and delete SPAM when we find it. I really don't think there *is* a solution when the spammer account holders are humans instead of computers. We have multiple legitimate renewable energy enthusiasts from China that use our board, and banning the IP of the spammers in httpd.conf on our servers would ban the legitimate users too =- most comes from the same or very similar IPs. Someone is paying these folks to sign up for accounts and SPAM us. (sigh) Like I don't have enough of a workload already! DANF > Comment spam is a *huge* problem for my customers. Blocking or throttling > by IP address is useless as the comment spam comes from what amounts to > random source addresses. <snip> I just want to chime in that my blog was asaulted by an anonymous spammer. My solution was to only allow posts by registered logins. It's terrible, but I don't have the first clue as to how to allow random people to comment as well as tell computers to stuff themselves.