In order to try and prevent the spamming issues, I finally had to do something I didn't want to do—and that's implement a Captcha process to the comments.
When you wish to post a comment, you'll now be required to fill in the text you see in the image right below the comment box. This is to help ensure that it's a real person entering in the comment and not just a spam bot. If this doesn't help with the problem, the next step will be either to require a valid e-mail (in which you'll have to go through a verify process the first time you post) or I'll start approving all comments manually. I really hope I don't have to turn off commenting altogether, but I'm tired of deleting 20-30 spam messages a day.
For those of you wondering, I used LylaCaptcha for my captcha needs, which worked on really well. I was going to type up a "how-to", as the documents on the LylaCaptcha site aren't as straightforward as they could be. Once you figure out what you need to do, it's very straightforward, but I found I had to really do a lot through trial an error. Anyway, the reason I'm not doing a write-up is Brian Rinaldi already wrote what I ended up doing in a blog post titled Adding Open-Source LylaCaptcha to BlogCFC.
I've been working on modifying some ColdFusion based web services for XStandard originally written by Ben Nadel. One of the things the original code didn't support was the Spell Checker support feature built-in to XStandard.
After doing some searching, it appeared the Jazzy Spell Checker Java API would fill my needs nicely. It's based on the algorithms in aspell and it can use both dictionary and phonetic files to help with spelling suggestions and it returns all the information required by XStandard (position of word and suggested spellings.) The only "disadvantage" of Jazzy is that it does come "ready-to-use" with CFMX—you need to write a wrapper class for easy use w/ColdFusion. (More on that to come in a later post.)