I don’t know others, but in my site, I only use Captcha, and it works fine without a single spam. On the contrary, if I disable it, I can get 10 spams in less than 5 hours
why no one mentioned captcha? I enable all the comments/trackback/pingback features without using any of the plugins you guys mentioned, and got absolutely no spam at all, a blog about this (yes, I use another plugin, but in a total different approach of distinguishing between human and bots)
http://liucougar.scim-im.org/blog/archives/9
for one day, I disabled the plugin and I got 10 spams in less than 5 hours, I think.
Take a look here for the Patched verion of EditMonkey which disables the annoying feature of WP, also you may want to try EditMonkey 😉
http://liucougar.scim-im.org/blog