Helpful Coder

This is a system I've been working for for probably a couple years now total. It runs on a fairly busy site, and is meant to prevent comment spam. The comment system itself uses flat files, and is a custom-coded ColdFusion system, built to order. I'm not a huge fan of ColdFusion - it seems like everything I try to do with it is about twice as difficult as it should be - perhaps I'm just too used to PHP and Perl. Anyways, I'm going to give a general overview of the system. I can't post code, because the code belongs to the client. But perhaps the general idea of the system will be enough to be helpful to someone out there. So, when someone leaves a comment, it's immediately visible and an email is sent to the admin, so he knows and can take action if the comment is spam. That worked fine for far longer than you'd expect, but eventually the spammers found it and started bombarding him with crap. So, the first line of defense we added was quite simple - it bloc...