[wp-hackers] Close old comments and pingbacks: feature or plugin?

[Jamie Holly]

I handle the backend work for two very popular political blogs that are on
Wordpress (combined hits for the two are about 3/4 million a day). The
comment spam is a nightmare. One thing I did that helped reduce a lot of it
was to rename wp-comments-post.php to a random name and update the comment
form's action to that new name. That greatly reduced the amount of spam.
Instead of getting hit with 400-500 spam comments at once, they now get
maybe 5-10 a day. 

There is a plugin to auto-close comments on posts after X number of days. It
is available here:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Auto_shutoff_comments

We are getting ready to do that on one site. The only changes I want to make
are removing some of the hooks. Considering there are 12-15 posts a day on
this site with each post getting 200-300 comments, I am removing all the
hooks and just having it activate when a post is published/saved (need to
save every bit I can on the server). 

Jamie Holly
http://www.intoxination.net


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