Glad to see people working on the comment moderation issue, I'd like to suggest a few more tweaks that would make things a bit easier for wp installs that deal with lots of comments, it may be easy to add these things into the projects being discussed here.

The wp settings for "if comment has X number of links" hold for moderation - I'd love some options for keeping that setting yet allow some overrides - perhaps by user level, but maybe by amount of approved comments - and it would be nice to allow some commenters to bypass akismet as well.

I use comments on some pages for ongoing conversations with a few moderators - sometimes they need to post something that has a dozen links in it, and it would be nice if the hold for moderation with comments having more then X (is it 2 by default?) - could be bypassed by my non-logged in users who already have 20+ (or backend select-able amount of) approved comments.

A couple of my moderators are in different countries that get dynamic ip addys - and often times some of their important posts (err comments) get flagged by akistmet and stuck in the tab I will never see... it would be nice if I could set their email addy, or amount of approved comments to be an indicator to skip akisment completely.

Not sure if these things are already possible in some way, but it would be super helpful I think for others as well.

I imagine there may be methods to deal with these two issues if a user is logged in and has a user role (?) - and my moderators do that sometimes.. but on other pages we just use a basic password protected page that only the mods have access to so spam is not an issue on those pages, or with those commenters.

I can certainly relate to the issue that Jeff is describing in this post - it's something I deal with on a regular basis and would love to see more enhanced options for making the comment moderation better.