The original suggester is the head of the antispam team, just for the record. :)
Spam is definitely a medium problem now, and if you look at similar services, it's a huge problem there: unless a services is diligent and vigilant about the issue as aggressively as possible, it becomes a major spam target and once that happens, it's a lot harder to address. (Look at InsaneJournal, for instance; I don't know what percentage of their activity is spam, but judging by comments to their news posts, the results of their random journal search, and the fact that whenever you load their stats page, you have pretty good chances of hitting over half spammers in the "recently created" and "recently updated" sections, I'd venture a guess of anywhere from 50-75% of their activity is spam no matter how hard they try to squash it.) The only way to keep a service from being a major spam magnet is to diligently and vehemently address even the smallest bits of spam and prove to spam networks that spending time trying to spam the service is not a good return on investment.
DW's default CAPTCHA implementation is no longer image-based, by the way; individual journal owners can choose to switch back, but by default site-wide, we use text-based captchas with a significantly lower false-block rate and a much, much higher standard of accessibility. They also have the advantage of being more resistant to the proxying attack that's the standard way of breaking captchas these days.
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Spam is definitely a medium problem now, and if you look at similar services, it's a huge problem there: unless a services is diligent and vigilant about the issue as aggressively as possible, it becomes a major spam target and once that happens, it's a lot harder to address. (Look at InsaneJournal, for instance; I don't know what percentage of their activity is spam, but judging by comments to their news posts, the results of their random journal search, and the fact that whenever you load their stats page, you have pretty good chances of hitting over half spammers in the "recently created" and "recently updated" sections, I'd venture a guess of anywhere from 50-75% of their activity is spam no matter how hard they try to squash it.) The only way to keep a service from being a major spam magnet is to diligently and vehemently address even the smallest bits of spam and prove to spam networks that spending time trying to spam the service is not a good return on investment.
DW's default CAPTCHA implementation is no longer image-based, by the way; individual journal owners can choose to switch back, but by default site-wide, we use text-based captchas with a significantly lower false-block rate and a much, much higher standard of accessibility. They also have the advantage of being more resistant to the proxying attack that's the standard way of breaking captchas these days.