How to deal with small scale comment spam on small commercial sites? [closed]

When I’ve built a few sites for small businesses in the past, I’ve historically been able to do without anti-spam measures. I now have several sites which get maybe between 5 and 20 spam comments a month each. I have it set set so all comments must be moderated, which isn’t a really a big deal. I would call it good enough, except the content of these comments is often about Viagra, other drugs, russian porn sites, etc., and I feel like it reflects badly on me having this stuff appear in my clients mailbox, moderation queue, etc..

Akismet could undoubtedly help out with a lot of this stuff – but I can’t quite justify the price tag.

I try to avoid excessive plugins or bloat, and I feel like there should be a simple solution for this – either a very lean plugin, or a code snippet somewhere.

Any ideas?

Use Antispam Bee. It is free, doesn’t phone home, and it works surprisingly well as long as you dont change the comment form too much (you have to test it).
Just make sure you disable the mail notification for spam comments. 🙂