I use askimet on all my blogs, and love it. I've never had to pay a fee, I just got the key by signing up at wordpress.com. Sorry I can't help with the theme question.

Regards,
Kevin

Peters Anti-Spam Plugin will help out a great deal and it is a free plugin.

Akismet works fine... and its free.

WP Spam Free rocks

They want you to get a commercial API key if you make over $500 a month from your Akismet protected blog.

Thanks to all! I am trying out Akismet (got the key from wordpress.com). So far it's very easy to use ad to delete the spam all at once - very fast. Will check out other options and many thanks.

I edited all of my wordpres themes to remove the comments sections, disabled comments globally, disabled new memberships - I then installed a forum in a /forum subfolder. When I post an article in wordpress, I create a thread in the forum for the discussion of the article and link the 2 together.

Members only have one account, and that is in the forum. The spam conrtols of the forum software are a lot better then what is built into wordpress.

In other words, I use wordpress as a landing page / content management system / blog - what ever you want to call it. And the forum is used for the community and for the discussion of the articles.

For the spammers, I use ReCapthcah in the forums, pkus I have blocked a lot of networks out of asia.

This also allows me to use 2 different domain names, with a forum on one site and wordpress blog, that asts like a portal to the forum.