Polizeros has been getting about 1,000 spam comments a day of late, and while you never see them because Akismet traps them first, they are a nuisance, as well as putting an extra load on the server.
Virtually all of them get posted by spambots to old posts. Right, like someone is going to read a three year old post here and respond to the spambot’s offer to make their mortgage bigger or manhood smaller (or whatever it is their confused little brains are trying to sell.) But such spam comments happen all the time, about 1,000 times a day here.
So, I just installed another WordPress plugin, the highly useful comment timeout from James McKay. This automatically turns off comments made to any post before a predetermined date, thus killing most spambot attempts. So far, it’s working quite well, spam is now down to 40 per day rather than 40 per hour.
Nice tip – am being crushed by boredom of spam deletion, thanks.
The spambots must be reporting home that comments are blocked here. In the past eight hours, Akismet has blocked a mere six spam comments. This has to be because Comment Timeout is blocking comments from being made for older posts and the spambots have realized this and have stopped trying.
It’s a real shame that the free version of WordPress doesn’t let you install plugins to deal with spam. Akismet deals with much of it but a lot still gets through (usually on posts a few months old). I contacted WP to ask them to install a plugin for me which disallowed comments on old posts. This was the reply:
Hi,
I’m sorry but we do not install plugins.
Akismet had a small glitch a couple of days ago which caused a lot to get through. Unfortunately there is little more we can do against spam: http://akismet.com/stats Closing old comments is of little use – the spammer simply shift their targets.
–
Mark
Personally I think they could have been a bit more helpful seeing as they frequently contact me to ask me to moderate obscene spam that gets through and that I haven’t yet noticed. Strangely, I don’t get this problem with my blogger site which has more traffic.
Hmm, well closing comments here has certainly cut down the spam, so I’m not sure what they mean.
I have moderation on for all comments except those whose email address I’ve okayed. Thus, no comment spam can get through and actually be posted. This works on WordPress.com blogs too.
Another option on WordPress.org blogs is to install some version of Capcha, so the commenter has to type in an answer to a question.