Blogger, I see, has enabled a comment moderation feature whereby bloggers can approve or reject comments before they appear on their posts. This is, in my opinion, a better comment spam reduction method than CAPTCHA images, because CAPTCHA completely rules out blind users and gives trouble to low-vision and low-literacy users - it's a more accessible solution for them.
Of course, the flipside is that the comment moderator needs to deal with a larger volume of information, and we all have plenty of data right now. I'm sure Bayesian filters could be applied to suggest spam-vs-not-spam test results, or some other method. Personally I moderate comments by the following procedure:
- Receive the comment via email.
- Decide if it's spam. If so, proceed. Otherwise just archive the email.
- Go to the offending comment and delete it from Blogger permanently.
- Disallow further comments on the affected post.
The last step is because the spambots keep keyword-searching (apparently) and keep finding the same blog posts over and over. Disallowing further comments prevents them from spamming that particular post.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - Another downside of moderation is interference with the "liveness" of blog comments.
PPS - Since moderated comments could take ages to show up at all.
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