It's amazing how watching Dumb and Dumberer can actually make you feel dumberer.  The subtext team released a new version that addressed a lot of bugs, so I went and installed it.  This version is subtitled "Shields Up" for all of the spam features that come with.  It's a little rough around the edges but it seems to do the job, although it took me a while to figure out that if you enable captcha, it will only show up when commenting if you're not signed in as admin!  In my defense though, I've had dumberer on in the background making me literally making me dumberer.