I Got Help Fighting Spam on Old Comments

How many times have you heard (read) me say “I HATE SPAM”?

Seems like a Zillion, I know. I almost get tired of saying it. But I will keep on saying it, and fighting the Good Fight against Spam.

Most people I know who Blog use Akismet, Bad Behaviour and the like. So do I, but recently I have been getting a lot of Manually Input Spam on older posts. Things that have been around for months with nary a comment and suddenly there are 4 or 5 or more comments. They have nothing to do with what the post was about, just the usual “Nice Post…” with a link hidden in the signature leading to a nefarious (read porn, drugs, etc.) site.

I’m not really sure why this started happening. It’s only been a recent phenomenon, and I have been handling it through comment moderation. Maybe it’s because I’ve been around for so long (Oct ‘05) and have well over 700 posts or because I have a PR5 or just that Spammers are getting sneakier. Whatever the reason, it is getting to be too much.

I did come across a Plug-in for WordPress that seems to be the answer for this most recent spat of spam. It’s called Comment TimeOut 2.0. I’m not sure where I found it, probably from one of my daily reads, but thanks for the tip whoever it was.

Here’s what Comment Timeout 2.0 does according to the Author, James McKay…

• Allow comments on posts less than x days old: This indicates how long to leave comments open after a post has been published. If no comments are received during this time, the comment form will be closed. The default is 120 days.
• Also allow comments until x days after last approved comment: This indicates how long to leave comments open after the last approved comment in the discussion. Comments in the moderation queue, spam and deleted comments are not counted. The default is 60 days. If you do not want the discussion extended when comments are received, set this to zero.
• Or on popular posts until x days after last approved comment: Same as the above, but for popular posts. If you don’t want to consider any posts to be “popular”, set this value to the same as the previous one.
• Where “popular” means at least x approved comments: This indicates how many comments a post must have in order to be considered “popular” and entitled to the longer interval between comments. The default is to increase the timeout to 365 days after 20 comments.
• On older posts: When this is set to “Close comments”, the comment form will be closed on older posts and any attempts to post a comment will be rejected. When it is set to “Send to moderation queue”, the comment form will remain open, but all comments on older posts will be flagged for moderation. The default is to close comments.
• Trackbacks and pingbacks: When this is set to “Treat as comments” (the default), trackbacks and pingbacks will be lumped together with the comments in the calculations. When it is set to “Handle independently”, they will be subject to the same rules as the comments, but treated separately, so if you are getting a lot of comments but few trackbacks, trackbacks may close before comments, or vice versa. “Do not time out” means that trackbacks and pingbacks remain open indefinitely, regardless of what happens to the comments.
• Apply these rules to pages, images and file uploads: This indicates that these rules should be applied to anything that isn’t a post within your blog chronology, i.e. pages, images and file uploads. If you uncheck this, pages that have comments open will have them kept open indefinitely by default.
• Allow individual posts to override these settings: This indicates that individual posts should be allowed to specify their own timeout values. If you are not using this option, you can gain a little performance by turning it off, as it uses an extra database query on each request.

I just installed it this morning, but I did check out some of the older posts and the comments are all closed on anything older than 120 days past. I also noticed on the newer posts that there is a note in the comments section giving a date that comments will be closed for each post.

I, for one, am really thankful to James for writing this Plug-in. Now, I don’t have to review useless spam comments and close comments manually on posts that everyone except the spammers forgot about.

[tags]Comment-Timeout,Spam,Anti-Spam[/tags]

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