Comment Timeout: Automatically closing blog comments on WordPress

Posted at 13:33 on 26 December 2006

Here is a WordPress plugin that automatically shuts off comments on older posts, unless they still have an active discussion going on.

Like everyone else, my blog was getting pretty heavily spammed. I have been using a combination of Akismet and Bad Behavior and this has had considerable success. However, I noticed that a lot of the spam comments that were coming through were targetting posts that were over a year old.

I've come across some popular blogs that are getting thousands of spam comments a day. Amazingly, nearly all of them keep comments open on all their entries, in some cases going back as much as four or five years. Why would anyone want to post a legitimate comment today on your trip to New York five years ago?

Since I started using this approach a couple of weeks ago, it's proven to be pretty successful. Beforehand, Akismet was handling an average of five spams a day, with one day chalking up more than seventy. Bad Behavior knocked that figure down to typically one a day. Now, spam comments seem to be almost non-existent.

Some blog software such as CommunityServer and dasBlog has this functionality built in, though as far as I'm aware the ability to keep active discussions open is a new one. Unfortunately, WordPress has hitherto had no such facility, apart from a much simpler plugin which isn't configurable and doesn't allow for active, ongoing discussions.

This is a beta release of the plugin, and it has been tested on WordPress 2.0.5. Any feedback would be welcome.

[Update 28/12/2006]: I've created a separate page for the plugin, and released an update that is compatible with WordPress 2.1 alpha 3.