I've been running Community Server on this blog for a long time.  It's good, but there's always been a spam problem.  Unfortunately the guys at Telligent Systems don't seem to see this problem and thus there is no anti-spam tools built into it.  At least not in my version.  As the volume of spam rose, I can't sit by and manually fight it any longer.  So I've implemented a CAPTCHA system developed by Dave Burke (an expert in customizing and deploying CS). Thanks to his free tool and very helpful support, I've installed and seen a sudden drop in the automated spam messages that were flooding my site.  Great work Dave and thanks for the support when I was implementing it.

And to all the readers / commenter’s, I'm sorry for the added level of complexity.  Unfortunately, it is required on the Internet these days.