I receive on average about 10 comments a day and I a notification is sent to my smart phone. I usually approve or mark a comment as spam relatively quick, unless I am a sleep of course. Since I have enabled moderation for all comments, I have not noticed any drop off in the volume of comments thus far.

The vast majority of spam comes in through bots, not humans. Kill the bots before they post and it’s a simple matter of reading your comments, as you do here, to spot any abuse. I have three different plugins running to corral the bot spam, and I check in for new comments periodically, marking the spam as such, which adds it to my black list.

I don’t disagree that we need to weed out the spam, I just think the work flow should assume a good comment and then remove it if the assumption was incorrect.

I’m not so much new as i am new again.

What if they post a quality comment the first time and than spam the next one?

I moderate all comments for the first time only (just to make sure it’s a real human and not a bot)

There are a few automated comment tools that are widely used by spammers.

Akismet works fine, but it takes more to combat human spam.

Human intervention is the best defense.

I do moderate comments since long time to avoid 3 types: spam comments, irrelevant comments to the topic of the post and of course linking to bad neighbourhood.

Even with excellent anti-spam plug-in you need a human review and this is at least I do believe in this in my case!