Disable Comments, Stop Spam

Forget Akismet. Forget Bad Behavior. Forget comment spam. There’s a very simple and easy to implement tweak you can make to a blog, particularly easy in Wordpress, to dam the flood of comment spam that involves no plugin installations, no IP address filtering, no requirements for your readers to have Javascript enabled and not be running No Script…

Simply disable comments on your blog!

Huh? That’s a self-defeating approach, surely? What about engagement with your readers, what about community, what about discussion? Well, for some blogs, there may be no need to have discussion. You may be providing information, news, and entertainment that requires no comment. You can, of course, enable a feedback form, a single page rather than a comment form on every post and page, which may get spammed, but will not act as a conduit for the cr*pflood you’re used to if you have a well-ranking blog wide open to comment spammer.

You could alternatively, take the discussion elsewhere by enabling the Tweet This plugin, for instance, or any of the various Share This and Add That and Bookmark Those plugins that allow readers to flag your post for further discussion and review on the likes of StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us, Sphinn, and Twitter.

However, most of us really don’t want to close off channels of discussion or act as portals for those external sites. We want people to discuss our blog posts on our blogs, we want to engage directly with our readers. So, what’s the answer? Compromise, of course.

Instead of disabling comments altogether, you can, in Wordpress Settings, under the Discussion tab set your posts to automatically close comments on articles older than “x many days”. Depending on your posting frequency you might see good results choose x = 7, 14, 28, even 60 days.

Sciencetext was quite the spammy-magnet, so I started experimenting with that setting some time ago and have discovered that 28 days suits me fine, it means half a dozen spam comments each day (as opposed to 100s), but doesn’t lock out readers who may stumble upon older posts via the search engines. 28 days means also that the last 8-10 posts are always available for comment.

Intriguingly, the day after I first drafted this post, one spammer started hammering the previous day’s post, 127 spam comments overnight. Of course, I simply added a deny IP address command to the .htaccess file and they’re off-the-air. But, it was strange to see that effect, as if the spambot suddenly homed in on a single post.

Was this a totally obvious post? Is it sensible to disable comments after a set time? Let me know! But, do it before the end of April or you won’t be able to comment.