Have any of you got any experience with using Bad Behaviour (http://error.wordpress.com/2006/07/04/bad-behavior-2/) on your websites? It's a system, primarily developed as a Wordpress plugin but also adaptable to other content management systems, that examines Http requests to see if they're malicious, and from the software's own blog, it appears to be very effective.
Currently, very little spam makes it past my filters, but about 20% of all hits to the content management system that runs Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan (http://www.rocr.net/) are in some way malicious - attempted comment spam, referral spam, various script kiddie tricks. I'd like to conserve the wasted bandwidth and computer cycles, and keep those requests out of my statistics. Also, the vast majority of all searches on my blog are from blog spammers inserting their links into any web form they can find. It's a big problem that could risk bringing down my website again.
If you run Wordpress, you may need this or already have it; but I'm most interested in hearing from people who got it to work with software other than Wordpress, which it may not do out of the box.
I'm no PHP programmer, but I've got access to a good one.
Moderatiors are your friend. Honestly, doing a website, even if you are supplying the content on your own, all by yourself is hard when it gets to the point where it's popular. It's usually not a bad idea to get (trustable) help once you've grown to the point of needing it.
Reinder, sounds like a good idea. Wish I could help you, but I've no experience at all with most blog software. I tend to be one who writes stuff from scratch... much to my dismay. Let me know if it works for you though, as I may recommend it to other users.