Spam for Christmas, Anyone?

I have been having a sudden influx of spam making it onto my blog posts, so I am temporarily activating the comment moderation feature. I will approve comments as quickly as I can, and I will make sure that anyone who enters the Hallmark giveaway today isn’t penalized by this action.
This is the first time I have seen Akismet not doing its job. Has anyone else had problems with it? And do you have any recommendations for alternatives?
Thanks, all!
UPDATED: I’m not sure how this happened, possibly during the last WordPress upgrade, but somehow the Akismet plugin had been deactivated on my blog. So that explains the spam going into the regular comment flow.
I do still find a lot of spam that is caught but must be checked through just in case, so I have installed a word verification plugin which doesn’t look too tricky and changed the moderation settings so I should only have to approve each commenter one time before they automatically get published.
I appreciate everyone’s patience as I get this figured out!
Tags: