i am completely at a loss with the spam plugins that come with movable type. i read the instructions, i thought i understood. i made the settings a bit tougher because spam comments were coming through and not being marked as junk based on the default settings. i apparently set the threshold too high because even people on the whitelist could not leave comments without them being marked as junk. i tried to change the weights so that people i trusted could go through. this only worsened the situation and even my comments were being marked as junk! so i decided to give up and put everything back to the default settings. i have made some changes over the basic template that should help reduce comments. (awhile back i changed it so one must preview the comment before it is posted.) if spam comments become a burden, i'm really going to have to rethink this.