Close comments on old blog posts

Some say closing blog comments is stupid as it kills old conversations. BUT with 300+ spams a day on 5 years of archives, it was driving me batshit. it was so worth the effort to tidy things up.

I would highly (HIGHLY) recommend doing this. I use Movabletype and implemented Conversation Killer (http://www.chompy.net/lab/mt/conversationkiller/). I (http://www.mysimpleexperience.com) have not received any comment spam since.

I highly recommend taking the time to do this. I am using MT – so I could use the MT plugin CloseComments to do it.
http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/closecomments.php
I close all comments after 7 days and very rarely get spam comments now.

I run this SQL on my Postgres DB once a week or so. It cuts the spam to almost nothing:

update mt_entry set entry_allow_comments = 2 where entry_blog_id = 1 and current_timestamp – entry_created_on > interval ‘3 weeks’;

I only occasionally got comments on old posts and it’s made a huge difference in the amount of spam I have to deal with.

Script in host root dir (with simple WP install), the .txt dropped from the filename. Visit periodically, it closes comments on everything up to a week ago. (I’ve not got access to cron, and couldn’t be bothered wiring this in with anything else)

see :

http://dannyayers.com/2004/12/close-comments.php.txt

It’s limited to Moveable Type, but I’m using a plug-in called MTClose 2 that has saved me sooo much time in closing old comments. You can get it here:

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~cammy/sw/000480.shtml#000480

It would probably only take a half or an hour or something. But it is definitely priority C, and so never gets done!

But I host blogs for several family members and they’re getting hit really hard. MT3 moderation has helped tremendously, but the only posts that get hit are the old ones, and those aren’t getting any new legitimate posts anyway.