1) you can not win.
2) you can not draw.
3) you can not leave the play.

Greetings,

Antonio, from Malaga (Spain)

for what problem do you want a solution?
a) make your blog spam free;
b) do (a) effortlessly;
c) do (b) for every blog site;
d) achieve (c) once and forever;
e) achieve (d) for every form of communication, not just blog.

Also, would you consider solving a problem 90% victory or defeat?
If you want (e) and 100%+, then I’m afraid there is no silver bulet. But if you think that every step which makes spammers extra problem without harm to the good guy, it’s worth doing, then read on I have few [teoretical] thought.

First, (a) is achievable by allowing only proofread and approved comments. I don’t know is that acceptable according to moral codex of blogger. But goal is achievable 100%. If 90% solution is acceptable, then maybe you can let your readers to help your other readers to avoid visiting spammers by implementing some vote system.

Granted, this requires resources to implement. Can you automate that? Of course, it requires testing, but how about checking comment and contents of the links in it against SA’s database which you use for e-mail? After some training I think good portion of spam would be filtered out. Remaining could be dealt using manual methods.

Goals (c)-(e) are somethere beyound horizon, but to aproach to them I don’t see any other way than methodically cutting opportunities for spammers and lowering their revenue:expences rate.

And if all your post is about yet another case where marketoids won over techies, then I’m saddened by that fact no less than you. Do you have solution for this problem? :-)