All of my blogs (Dr. Weevil, Curculio, Write It Right, and a couple of dormant spin-offs) are being inundated with a flood of comment-spam. Yesterday alone I deleted 200 comments from Dr. Weevil. Between my 6 1/2-year-old computer, the dial-up connection, and Earthlink's sluggish host-machine, it took over three hours. The latest spammers were very slick about attaching each comment to a different post, not posting to sequential posts, and using a large selection of URLs.

Like Jim Treacher, I have turned off comments on all of my blogs until I can come up with a foolproof spam-repellent. The one exception is a new blog I've been thinking of launching, called Orbilius. Since it didn't have any entries yet, I've put a copy of this post there and turned comments on for that blog only. With only one post, I can easily delete any quantity of comment-spam.

Advice is much appreciated, but please read these provisos first:

1. Call me cheap, but I don't want to spend any money.
2. If at all possible, the method has to work on MT 2.0 and 3.0. Though I don't recall the URLs, I've read more than one site-owner complaining that an MT upgrade had wiped out all his comments. I don't want to risk that, and have stuck with the versions I began with (2.0 for Dr. Weevil, 3.0 for the rest).
3. Closing old comments doesn't seem to work. I have used the MT Editing menus to close hundreds of comments 'by hand' on both of my main sites, that is, I have unchecked 'allow comments' for each one individually. Nevertheless, spammers continue to leave comments on all of them.
   (I even get comments attached to posts I haven't written yet. I don't know how that can be possible, but it happens. When I go into the Editing menu and delete a comment, I am taken to the post to which it was attached. About a quarter of the time, that post is blank.)
4. I don't want to install a complex registration system. There are some sites I rarely visit any more because I've been unable to figure out how to leave a comment. I don't want to be like them.
5. I would like to ask the commenter to type in a number displayed as a picture, so spam-spiders can't read it. Can any of my readers tell me how difficult this is to implement, and where to find the software?

If you have any advice to give, please go to Orbilius and post it in the comments there. The sooner I solve the problem, the sooner I can turn comments on again here -- not to mention posting on more interesting matters.