Need captcha tip – WordPress 2 / Steam / Akismet interaction?

I give up. I am simply too {overwhelmed | tired | lazy | ignorant} to keep digging for the solution – so if some patient reader wants to shout out, I’ll be forever grateful.

There are loads of cool captcha plugins for wordpress, to help filter out spambots. I already use the Akismet plugin for weeding out comment spam, and it is great, but not great enough – I still have to wade through junk, and can only be bothered to do it every so often.

Captcha plugins to the rescue! What could be simpler? Grab the plugin, drop it into the ../../plugins folder, enable it from the WordPress management plugins management page – prestomundo!

Whoa, not so fast… . There are exceptions. There are interactions with existing plugins. There are graphics library implications. There are WordPress version implications. Oh, and there’s a comments.php file that needs a little manual editing. “Easy peasy.” I’m normally halfway decent at this stuff, but have failed to solve this in an acceptable amount of time, hence this plea for help. I am not complaining: software changes, shift happens – no big deal – I like WordPress and understand the tradeoffs of having custom tools – I have just run out of energy on this one.

My constraints: it must work with this exact setup (please):

Version = WordPress 2.0 (OK, it’s old)
Theme = Steam, with personal modifications to the styles, but only modest ones
Graphics libraries = don’t go there
Existing key plugin I won’t remove: Akismet

If it’s self-evident that I need to change my setup, I can probably be convinced.

How do you reach me? Try commenting and I’ll see if it gets through my existing filters!!

Many thanks!

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