Results
My experiment in free discourse seems to have been well-received but poorly-executed. The internet is still rife with comment spam, and my adaptive spam filter appears to do a fairly bad job at discerning legitimate comments from spam ones: out of 32 comments, it tagged the 4 legitimate ones as spam and let 4 spams through. Spammers have moreover caught on the idea of creating accounts on Blogger, so that they can use their IDs to authenticate themselves on my site, bypassing my spam controls. At any rate, there is a very simple solution to the spam problem, which is used on sites like Blogger and Blogspot. CAPTCHAs, images of distorted text that test whether a user is a human, are extremely easy for humans to read, but extremely difficult for spammers to bypass. It's not a perfect system: some spammers have succeeded in overcoming the system with low probability, and it limits accessibility of the visually impaired. But I think it is the best of an imperfect set of options, and hopefully it will be easy to implement on MovableType.
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It's a Turing test!
Except that it's like an inverse Turing test. Instead of the human attempting to distinguish between human and other machines, the machine tries to distinguish the machine from the human. It's by far the more interesting puzzle.