Red Echo

September 19, 2008

I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam lately, up to a couple dozen posts a day. I filter it all out before it ever shows up on the site, but it’s annoying. I noticed that real people always post to recent articles and spam-bots almost always post to old articles, so I implemented this technique for disabling comments on old posts. If you are using wordpress and have a comment-spam problem, it’s worth a try.

1 Comment

  1. I highly recommend Akismet. My comments spam went up to over a hundred a day, significantly increasing the risk that I would accidentally “spam” legitimate comments, since they were outnumbered by a factor of several hundreds. Since using Akismet, I get about one every few days (I’m sure it’d probably drop to near-zero if I disabled comments on old posts, but I actually get a fair number of legit comments on older posts). My spam has spiked recently; that usually indicates it’s time to upgrade (I know there was a security issue in my current version).

    Comment by Micah Cowan — September 19, 2008 @ 1:42 pm