Lorelle,

I've given it some though (sorry that it has taken me so long) but I have to agree with at least some of your points.

I've decided to follow Cybele's approach, if a single post is getting a lot of spam, I'll close that one off manually and leave the others open.

I'll be removing the plugin within the hour. Besides, it didn't achieve the goal anyway I can consider the experiment a miserable failure.

I might, however, have to seek out other comment spam prevention methods...

Oh, Jonathan, I have plenty of thoughts. Recently, a post on the Blog Herald went ballistic with traffic and comments. It was linked to by a popular blog as a historical reference, and their post was dug by Digg. I had a post which got little traffic which I wrote over a year ago suddenly get dug and I had over 6,000 visitors and 25 comments in one day - mostly people saying how thankful they were about the post, but also asking more really good questions. That resulted in a more articles on the subject, which I'd ignored for a year since there was little response to begin with.

But most of all, by closing off comments, you are letting the spammers win.

I get 3,000 comment spams a day caught by Akismet, sometimes more. In the past couple months, more are getting through as more are spamming my blog. I travel a lot so I have to go one to three days between checking comments for spam and questions. I use the Mass Edit Mode and can quickly dispatch the comment spam that get through. It's manageable.

For me, it is always more important to let the conversation continue at any point. You and I write fairly timeless material, so your article on copyright theft has just as much validity three months ago as it does 2 years ago.

I have a lot of other reasons, but most important, don't let them win!

I've found it necessary to close old posts to comments and trackbacks for the same reason. The following plug-in works nicely in wordpress to do this, and has some other options to extend commenting time for more popular posts:

http://www.jamesmckay.net/code/comment-timeout/20/

Jeremy,

I'll let you know how it goes. I'll give it a few weeks and see what the result is.

Lorelle,

Sadly, I took stock on the comment spams that got through over the last few weeks and all were to posts over 90 days. Also, I do update old posts and even have a related posts feature to further present more recent material, but I'm having a real problem with people not clicking through to the more recent posts and commenting on the old ones.

I am considering changing it so that it is extended thirty days after last comment and not post date. After thirty days of silence, one can consider the conversation pretty much dead me thinks.

Any thoughts on that?

Cybele,

It is a tough issue and I'm grateful for the feedback I've gotten on it. I'm not happy that I felt it came to this, but this is a pretty timely blog so most old material, with a few exceptions, can be closed off to comments.

What I might do is the inverse of what you do and selectively open things that are still valid and important. Posts like the Wordpress.com one could remain open but the ancient Housekeeing one about subscribing via email would not.

Thoughts on that?

I've debated closing comments on old posts before but have now taken a selective approach. When I get a lot of "caught" spam via Askimet (more than 10 posts in a week) on a particular post, I'll just close that one. I haven't tried re-opening it yet to see what happens.

But my content is a bit different than yours, so stuff from last Halloween is just as valid as stuff from this Halloween.

I support anything that bloggers do that keep them focused on content and not admin.

I'm sorry that you've decided to take on this myth. From my research and experience, most of the old style comment spam is aimed at older blog posts as their bots are still rolling around the web without stop, but the newer spam bots and trackback spammers are hitting posts published within minutes if not seconds.

Most are caught by Akismet, and I've found that adding Spam Karma and Bad Behavior cuts down comment spam almost to nothing that I have to handle.

And how often do you really publish new posts with new information and not update the original posts? That's an odd reason, Jonathan.

The increase in comment spam is because of your blog's popularity and number of incoming links, not because comment spammers are smarter. It's sad that the conversation needs to be cut off on old posts.

The time consuming part comes from scrolling through Akismet to check false/positives more than dealing with the ones that get through, right?

I've been thinking about doing that for a while now... stupid bots have been commenting on posts from 6 months ago lol.