Michael Heilemann has written “How to Stop Spam on WordPress” on Binary Bonsai. He’s sick of being locked out of commenting on other blogs, and I can’t blame him.
Unlike him, I’ve been getting gibberish spam (they literally don’t make sense), including one today on a post that was 9 days old. In reply to his post, I think he linked to the wrong plugin. I’m not sure what Optional Comment Moderation does, but I do know that Auto Moderate Coments does allow you to moderate old posts after user-defined period of time (it’s very simple to change, mine is set to 10 days). Plus, the plugin developer explained its functionality very well.
I agree with Michael’s comments, especially that it’ll take some work to weed through the moderation queue. But, your visitors can interact with you with basically no additional work on their part, and you can hopefully develop a more stable readership. I’m still not using any spam plugins, just Auto Moderate Comments, and a good comment moderation word list.
All Narfed Up 
One of the reasons I hate anti-spam plugins is I just received the highly insulting message
when I left a simple comment on a post on James’ site.
This is why I decided to come up with a way to stop comment spam without comment spam plugins.
Since I rolled out that methodology, 1 comment spam (and 3 trackback spams) made it through my defences to my moderation queue – none were published. Previously I was receiving dozens of spams per night.
Tom.
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Yeah. I think I’m happy with moderation, because at least no spam sees daylight on my blog. Plus, I really do think that all the spam that tries to get through really are on posts older than a week or so. I set mine to moderate after 10 days of inactivity.
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