Phil Haack has suggested a great alternative to the captcha. Personally I hate captchas because they are annoying and hard to read a lot of the time. Phil’s idea would block spam just effectively and doesn’t involve an action by the user in fact the user doesn’t even know it is there (the way it should be).

The Invisible Captcha control plays upon the fact that most comment spam bots don’t evaluate javascript. However there’s another particular behavioral trait that bots have that can be exploited due to the bots inability to support another browser facility.

You see, comment spam bots love form fields. When they encounter a form field, they go into a berserker frenzy (+2 to strength, +2 hp per level, etc…) trying to fill out each and every field. It’s like watching someone toss meat to piranhas.

At the same time, spam bots tend to ignore CSS. For example, if you use CSS to hide a form field (especially via CSS in a separate file), they have a really hard time knowing that the field is not supposed to be visible.