For a long time my little corner of cyberspace was quite, the neighbors didn’t make much noise and there were not a lot of strangers around.
Life was good…
Then reality came crashing in. For sometime now I have been getting comment spam. It has been confined to a single post [confusion.cc] from a single spam bot for the past few months. To manage this I added Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist [jayallen.org] plugin to my Movable Type installation. This allowed me to remove the offending post easily and for the most part automatically.
And life was good… for a time…
Today I had 136 comments posted to my journal. Comments posted by people with names like; cmxmqr, yreaiile, kaiewh, turjey, hkqoaq, etc. They have been coming in fairly regularly all day, about every 15 minutes. MT-Blacklist is still working, blocking a number of these posts, but spammers are persistent and my in box is getting full.
By lunchtime I was a bit annoyed about this and was trying to figure out what could be done. I went through a lot of heart ache when my email address first made the rounds with the spammers. I was a long hard struggle, but I am fairly spam free now thanks to spamassasin [apache.org]. I didn’t want to go through that painfully long process again to make my journal spam free. Then I remembered that over at Jonathan delacour’s [delacour.net] weblog there is a little tag line at the bottom of the comments on old posts. It reads This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed. This is a good idea, especially since most comments come within the first week or so that the entry is posted and most of these spam comments are being posted to achieved entries.
Now Jonathan doesn’t say how he does this, but a quick search of mt-plugins [mt-plugins.org] turned up this nice little plugin called CloseComments [mt-plugins.org] which does exactly what I want. It took only a few minutes of fiddling around with the plugin to get what I wanted.
And life is good… for now
I have set the CloseComments plugin to remove the ‘post a comment’ form from any journal entry over 14 days old which has not had a comment posted to it in 7 days. Now you will see in place of the ‘post a comment’ form a short note saying that comments are not allowed and pointing any lost soul, who may happen to wonder in from the cold and decide to participate in old discussions, to this post. So now, this discussion is over. Have a nice day.