One can have incredibly elaborate , yet very open sites (including providing the absolute maximum openness for Anonymous Comment and posting) and still have excellent security and a complete absence of SPAM.
Amazing. As I said, belatedly, in response to an old discussion:
On my site (mynichecomputing.org -- presently down) I use Mollom and also ask users to solve a math problem (captcha). With those 2 modules and with IP blocking of listed spammers (IPs seen via DB associated with making Anonymous Commenting moderated, before they are posted), I allow Anonymous Commenting to anything and allow Anonymous posting to 2 Discussion groups. The amazing result (which ALL should hear about):
Though there are 10-60 spam attempts per day, I have gone over 8 months without ANY spam getting through.
This truly may be of general interest.
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P.S. Updates and news
I finally got tired of moderating the 10-20 spam Comments per day, so I now send them through Mollom for screening too. Those they find acceptable still are sent back to the drupal system for my moderation (about 2/100) -- very nice!
I now find the bad IPs by looking at all new users who have signed-up (as authenticateed users). I just google their email address and see if they are on
any spam list (which also often gives their IP). I still block ("deny") IP based on
this procedure -- but no longer do it like I indicated in my main post.
My nice Drupal 6 site, http://mynichecomputing.org/drupal6 is now back up again,
so you can see that it is quite elaborate and how it is completely spam-free, in additon to being absolutely the most open site on the Internet for Anonymous posting and Commenting.