I wondered why all my comments about a great new poker site, or where to get cheap v1agra (now this comment is definitely getting moderated) never got posted ;)

Might be time to look at a system similar to wp-gatekeeper by Eric Meyer. A captcha system without the accessibility problems of using images. I've been using it for a while now, and while Askimet still has to block some spam messages its not as bad as it could be.

The only problem I have is from actual people submitting comments which *could* be valid but are most likely just looking for a link back. They're always along the lines of 'X is great, thanks for posting about it!'

I know they don't add any additional information to the post, but I don't like to remove them incase it is a genuine show of appreciation, cause that would somehow seem rude(!?)
And of course I don't want to scare people away from telling me how great I am ;)

What I might end up doing is marking those types of comments as 'temp' and then run a cron job or something every week to remove any which are over X days old. Leaving only comments that add additional relevant information in the archive.

Do you use akismet? Since installing it last year I don't get any spam comments (or at least very few)

..?

Don't know why you're trying to avoid captcha option. But It really helps prevent automated comments. I think you should give it a send thought.

Dave, I am working on such a system. Perhaps if I get it working, I'll let you know.

If the system works, it should catch 95-98% of spam I reckon.

Your site found in Google: http://google.com/search?q=mjx