In reply to Ryan Hellyer.

This. Akismet doesn't seem to be adapting well to the New Spam Model, which seems to be distributing blasts of comments through a series of random usernames and IP addresses via botnets.

And it'll never stop those industrious human bots who are pasting scripts into comment areas and manually defeating the captchas.

Akismet used to be top dog on the pile. The problem is, when everyone started using it, the spammers adapted, especially as WordPress' usage based increased. It's not easy being the primary target, but Akismet cannot be the single source be-all end-all of blog spam fighting anymore... the spammers have just become more distributed and more persistent!

That said, I don't have comments turned on on my business site, because there's no blog there. On the media/podcast sites and tech sites that I manage or am a part of, a few of those have comments going all the way back to 2005 (when I switched them from Movable Type to WordPress, LOL!)