A non captcha approach, what do you think?

I love efiction except for one important thing: My webhost is missing something so my captcha never worked on efiction (works on my phpbb board and PHP fusion though). I used to use basic captcha, but I messed up my databases like last year and reuploaded everything but basic captcha took off along with Hugos Nebula.:(

I use recaptcha but it doesn't work (does not match even when refreshed). Have looked for solutions throughout the board for months but they all seem to lead to more serious errors. For some time I've had captcha on to keep spammers out and told visitors to email me to become a member. It's very annoying and my new members went to '1' for some time. 😳

Leaving it without captcha attracted a few spammers and my site was just beginning back then, but this 'email me' thing is ridiculous. Do you think more people would join if I turned captcha off and let them register two days a week and leave it on five days a week? Or should I just permanently turn it off until I start getting nasty reviews? 😕

Anybody else got any ideas? Anyone else out there not able to use captcha, what else do you do or have you tried? I'd love any suggestions, really!