Yes, we had to shut down our comments.
As a small business, we couldn’t afford to put someone on the job of daily cleaning out the hundreds of spam comments left on our website. And since so many of our clients (OK, pretty much all of them) come in from referrals, this isn’t a priority.
Because our website has so many inbound links (a large number for a small agency) we see an inordinate amount of spam. Our comments (when open) require moderating — i.e. nothing gets posted unless we allow it. But when you get hundreds, or thousands of spam comments from bots every day, there comes a point when you just have to throw up your hands and shut down comments. That it comes right after a blog post about getting comments on your blog post? That’s just adding insult to injury.
Over the years we’ve used various captcha tools for our websites, including this one. But sooner or later they develop some kind of issue and we have to move on to something else.
Happy to take suggestions, and happy to converse on Facebook or Twitter.