Hi Roy, sorry that I didn't get back to this sooner but I've just arrived back from a speaking trip. To answer your question - yes, I have been slack in addressing the issue of comment spam. This has been due - in part - to my attention being on other matters - namely upgrading/rewriting RegExLib.com and building ProjectDistributor. Very - *very* - soon, the blogs over at Regexadvice.com will be upgraded to run on CommunityServer. This will give you the ability to have a much finer level of control over how comments are enabled on your blog.
Sorry that I've been so slack about this but we'll get it cleaned up and then port everything over.