Could we try something?

I'm thinking that recaptcha can be a PITA if only because it disrupts one's state of flow but people will put up with it to save trac from spam.

What if we replace captcha with a short, static question, the web form equivalent of a secret handshake? And give it enough weighting to override akismet?

E.g.

* What is Haskell's middle name?
* What is SPJ's middle name?

The main drawback to this is that it'll only be a matter of time before spammers wise up. But that interval might be long enough for something better on the horizon, e.g. akismet gets a lot smarter, better blog posts on tracspam, etc.

Also, spammers might be deterred enough to give up and look elsewhere.

Another drawback is that some folks won't actually know the secret handshake. Hopefully those numbers are very small.

p.s. A variant to this that's more search-proof is some trivial haskell:

E.g.

let fibs = 0:1: ... fibs in fibs !! n

where n is randomly chosen from 2, 3, or 4; where the answer is an instantaneous n-1.