Closing comments
I’m fed up to the back teeth with comment spammers, so I decided to do something about it. I do use the wpblacklist plugin, and that’s a great help, but you still miss one or two items when a new spammer appears and you haven’t updated your list. The majority of spam comments are made on old entries, so I decided to set up automatic closing of comments, as described here. I’ve set it to close comments after 14 daysâthat seems about right to me, but if anyone wants me to extend it a bit, just let me know. I’ve put a line in my cron file to run the script every day like this:
GET http://pathtoscript/auto-close.php > /dev/null 2<&1It goes without saying that anybody (except spammers!) who wants to make a comment on a closed entry only has to email me, and I’ll put the comment in myself.
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I've thought about something like that myself. I don't want to manually close comments all the time, but it seems like something they could add to WP that you could set an automatic comment closing after a set number of days. oddly enough, I just got a random comment on a rather old posting of mine. I assumed it was spam that slipped through and was about to delete it when I noticed there were no links in it - turns out it was someone who stumbled upon the entry while surfing for other info and just felt like letting me know how it happened!
As a side note, are you running WP 1.2RC yet? I just use the moderation function that holds anything with more than like 4 links in a queue. So far it's worked perfectly, but I don't know if you're getting hit enough that even that's a pain.----- I've just implemented Scott Merrill's self-authorising plug in for WordPress (at skippy.net) and it works like a dream. People who want to leave comments get an email with a URL to click and this does the business (alternatively you can accept the comments yourself via the moderation option). Spammers, because they're not quite dumb enough to use a real email address, don't get the chance to peddle their wares.
Very useful, too, for those of us who don't have access to cron jobs!
I've had a few spammers try to comment since I switched this on but not one has slipped through while more welcome visitors have commented (no pun intended) on the system's user-friendliness.
by Em² @ 19/05/2004 9:06 pm • Permalink •
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indieb0i: Yes, it would be a nice addition to the default setup. I haven't installed the latest WordPress yet. I've been a bit busy, and since the final release of 1.2 is so close, I thought I'd wait till that came out. I'm really looking forward to it!
Em2: That sounds very interestingâI'll have to check it out. I'm going to see how many spams slip through with the auto comment closing, and if it keeps most of them out, I won't bother to take more drastic measures.
by bsag @ 20/05/2004 5:05 pm • Permalink •
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