After John Chow wrote about this plugin, I thought it would be a fine addition to my list. It’s a plugin written by James McKay and it allows you to essentially shut down commenting on older posts. You can set the time limit (in days) and there’s also another limit that allows people to continue commenting on a popular post. You have a second limit there for how long since the last comment which is set independently. So even if you set comments to expire after 30 days, if people are commenting a lot, they can push beyond the 30 day limit. But then once the topic dries out, it will expire as well.
This is a wonderful tool for fighting spam as almost all of the spam I get are for very old posts. Anywhere from 6 months to a year old. By preventing them from posting in the first place it will clear up my Akismet queue and make it easier for me to spot false positives. If this sounds like something that would help you in your fight against comment spam, go download the Comment Timeout plugin.
comment spam, plugin, Wordpress
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Ian // Jan 30, 2007 at 5:13 pm
… except it ruins the utility of older articles. I’ve had people comment on several-month-old articles to clarify something I’ve written or to add something new. I doubt they would have taken the time to email me instead. I know I wouldn’t have, had I been in their shoes. I find Akismet is good enough that it just doesn’t matter.
2 Marc // Jan 30, 2007 at 10:12 pm
That’s a good point to make. While I think it’s a bit much to suggest that it ruins the utility of older articles, it certainly is an important point that is important to consider.
If you want to maintain long-term comments, stay away from this thing. While this plugin gives the cold shoulder to spammers, it does the same for someone who happens to stumble upon an older post and has something to comment. While you can set longer times, that effectively nerfs the plugin anyways so it would be best to avoid the plugin altogether if you want to allow long term comments.