My web hosting company has not been particularly helpful in my ongoing fight against spam. I upgraded to MT5 and added captchas to comment forms a few months back but apparently the added load was enough of a problem that my hoster uninstalled Image::Magick and disabled the compiler on my account. If this sounds like a harsh response, I'm right there with you—but I can also appreciate the guidance they provided that I should probably spend more than $4/month on hosting before complaining about server load. Honestly I have no idea how they make ends meet but it's their business, not mine.
In the wake of the Image::Magick uninstall, I've been relying on my crusty old spam script to tag and remove spam before it gets into the archive. The script is effectively a big pile of regexes and unfortunately over the last month it has only caught ~14% of all messages coming into the blog, which is something like 15% of all spam. It used to work pretty well but spam has evolved substantially since I first put it to work about three or four years ago.
So I'm on reCaptcha now, which seems to be working fine. Bother me if it causes you problems—most of you know how to get in touch with me offline.
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