cowboy comment spam banning

this post is really only germane if you are interested in the technical aspects of this blog and the constant battle i wage against comment spam. i have been getting at least 1 comment spam every minute for the last couple weeks. this is not an exaggeration, and it is VERY distracting.
i just upgraded all the wordpress scripts on my site to the bleeding-edge overnight build, doing it in my customary cowboy-style by overwriting everything without too much thought to backing up. sometimes that doesn’t work out too well, but today i got lucky. i had been using kitten’s spaminator, but for some reason it stopped being effective. now i am trying a combination of kitten’s spam words, (which dynamically updates a blacklist of words, URIs and IPs) and tar pit. someone on the #wordpress IRC recommended spam karma, which i will try if this doesn’t work.

UPDATE: why didn’t i do this earlier? perhaps now i can actually get some work done. it’s AWESOME to receive emails informing me that spamming IPs are getting COMPLETELY SHUT DOWN when they try to access this site. knowing the way that things work though, i will soon get a phone call from my mom asking why she has been identified as a spam robot. (don’t laugh, it has happened before).