Captcha Plugin

Recently I was creating a Ruby on Rails site and was curious about the best way tostop spam on the site. For account creation there is
:a) Captcha
b) email verification

For messages, forums I am sure you could try to check the message forany weird characters or typical spam phrases. I saw in the other post there is the hivelogic email enkoder for hiding email addresses forprotecting email addresses. I was reading a blog and it said captchaa nd email verification are bothersome to users. Almost seemed from theblog that it shouldn't be used. If that is true, what are RoR developers using? What is the best practice for Ruby on Railsdevelopers?

And finally found the answer at
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/recaptcha

Thanks Jason, Great Post