You now have to register to post comments

Things are getting out of hand here with spam, so I've changed the settings to require everybody who wants to comment to register for an account. It's easy to register, free and I don't do anything with the information. But I do so reluctantly and only because I haven't been able to figure out what to do about:

The site has a spam filter that's working just marvelously at detecting and blocking spam. The problem is it deletes spam after the core software sends out notifications to people who've signed up to be alerted to replies. Last night, I got several hundred of these bogus alerts. Other users also got lots of false alerts. So until I either figure out how to get the spam filter to go first, or install a "captcha" module (which would require you to type a string of characters to post), unfortunately, I have to require registration.