Due to an increasing amount of spam comments being posted to old blog posts, I have set the blog service to automatically lock comments to blog posts older than 3 weeks months. I felt 3 weeks months was about right to at least allow for conversations, if not let me know in email or comments to this post.
Spammers and comment bots ruin it for everyone unfortunately.
Sincerely, Shaan
Update 02/11/10 I have updated the script for auto closing out comments after 3 months.
7 comments
I think 3 weeks is very tight. I’m still getting plenty of valid comments in posts of mine from early 2008.
Akismet is automatically dealing with the spam on my blog with an accuracy rate of 99.6%. It’s missed only 4 spams and had 3 false positives in the last year, including one month with 100% accuracy from over 2,000 comments.
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Must admit have considered the same although bet my spam clearing overhead is far less than yours!
TypePad does a good job but some “apparently human” msgs seem to leak through (2 out of 3692 for me at the moment).
Have held off blocking as some of my old posts, esp on the personal blog, still attract some good comments years after publication.
Suppose the only answer is to “report as spam” those that do beat the system
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And the spammers are getting sneakier as well :-(.
All spammers must DIE!
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Steve,
3 weeks just seemed like a good number. The problem I have is I am a much larger target than your blog with me being Autodesk as well as tens of thousands of readers a day. I apparently attract the spam bots like flies especially recently. With 2000 posts that were all open for a period of 6 years it was time to reconsider and use my time a little wiser.
What about 4 or 5 weeks?
Cheers,
Shaan
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What about a couple of years, maybe? My most commented post, from March 2008, just got another valid comment today (its 66th).
But I’m a smaller target, I don’t use TypePad, I don’t know how accurate its spam catcher is or how tedious it is to go through the spam looking for false positives, and I don’t know how many you get (2150 spams a month is my record), whether you have IP blocking available to cut down on the volume, and how tedious it is to add spammer IPs to it.
I don’t know any of that stuff and you do, it’s your blog and your time, so just do what you think is best and I won’t complain, honest. 🙂
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OK I changed the auto closing comments to 3 months and we will see how that goes. The spammers seemed to be targeting the older blog posts thinking the blog author would not notice. Same with Trackbacks.
Cheers,
Shaan
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OK, good luck with the spam. I have trackbacks turned off completely; I have never found them useful anywhere, but that’s just me.
I think 3 weeks is very tight. I’m still getting plenty of valid comments in posts of mine from early 2008.
Akismet is automatically dealing with the spam on my blog with an accuracy rate of 99.6%. It’s missed only 4 spams and had 3 false positives in the last year, including one month with 100% accuracy from over 2,000 comments.
Must admit have considered the same although bet my spam clearing overhead is far less than yours!
TypePad does a good job but some “apparently human” msgs seem to leak through (2 out of 3692 for me at the moment).
Have held off blocking as some of my old posts, esp on the personal blog, still attract some good comments years after publication.
Suppose the only answer is to “report as spam” those that do beat the system
And the spammers are getting sneakier as well :-(.
All spammers must DIE!
Steve,
3 weeks just seemed like a good number. The problem I have is I am a much larger target than your blog with me being Autodesk as well as tens of thousands of readers a day. I apparently attract the spam bots like flies especially recently. With 2000 posts that were all open for a period of 6 years it was time to reconsider and use my time a little wiser.
What about 4 or 5 weeks?
Cheers,
Shaan
What about a couple of years, maybe? My most commented post, from March 2008, just got another valid comment today (its 66th).
But I’m a smaller target, I don’t use TypePad, I don’t know how accurate its spam catcher is or how tedious it is to go through the spam looking for false positives, and I don’t know how many you get (2150 spams a month is my record), whether you have IP blocking available to cut down on the volume, and how tedious it is to add spammer IPs to it.
I don’t know any of that stuff and you do, it’s your blog and your time, so just do what you think is best and I won’t complain, honest. 🙂
OK I changed the auto closing comments to 3 months and we will see how that goes. The spammers seemed to be targeting the older blog posts thinking the blog author would not notice. Same with Trackbacks.
Cheers,
Shaan
OK, good luck with the spam. I have trackbacks turned off completely; I have never found them useful anywhere, but that’s just me.