For those following along in the battle against comment spam, which is probably no one, I have a new update.
My last change was to have the "Submit" button read "Commit to Pay."
Overall, spam comments are down but not completely eliminated.
Meanwhile, the site's contact page has gotten no comment spam in months. For those who don't want to scroll back, I have two comment forms on the site. One is for the main site and one is for my author section of the site.
Earlier this week, I re-examined the two forms to try to figure out what the difference is. Why does one get no comment spam and the other gets a regular barrage of it? Especially baffling is that the main contact page should be easier to find as it is at the root level of the site whereas my author section is in its own directory.
Then I noticed that, in addition to everything else, I had at some point also added a field on the main contact page that asked the submitter to spell a specific word. Not hard to do especially when the word is right there but it's apparently something bots aren't able to figure out yet. Thank goodness for that.
So, I added such a field to my author contact page.
So far, so good. We'll see how it holds up long term.
I should also add something to track how many form submissions get rejected.