Comments closed/spam still coming in

  • I have a few blogs which are attracting comment spam, even though I have closed comments (“allow comments” and “allow pings” both unticked). They end up in moderation, so a weekly housekeeping task is deleting them.

    But how do they come in? Is there some back door way and how do I rectify? Searching through the forum, this issue has come up before but I didn’t really understand the answer.

    I am fairly technically competent, but a simple explanation would be appreciated. Many thanks.
    Silver

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  • If you disable comments and trackbacks in the WP dashboard, options, discussion (they may be named different in english, I use a german WP version), you set a default for new posts (which you can overwrite for any post), but do not change the comment settings for the published posts. So, the older posts are still open for commenting — and for the pest of the internet, spam.

    The most painful solution is, to edit every recent post in WP and unset the comment options. If you are technically competent and do not “fear” a simple SQL query, you can use a SQL query to set the comment_status and the ping_status for all posts in your post table to closed, which should work for you. (The following SQL statement is for WP 2.3.x, it may be different on older WP versions.)

    UPDATE your_table_prefix_posts
SET comment_status = "closed",
ping_status = "closed"

    Of course: Backup before doing low-level stuff in the WP database!

    If you cannot access your database on SQL level (and don’t have a phpMyAdmin or something similar available), there may be another help. I remember that there is a plugin, which closes pings and comments for posts automatically, if they are older than one month. But I never tried it…

    What’s still coming in are likely Trackbacks. The usual spam advice applies:

    Install and activate Akismet or Spam Karma 2. Then install and activate Bad Behavior.

    https://akismet.com/
    https://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
    https://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/

    For those who struggle with the Akismet directions: https://wordpress.com/api-keys/

    See also the Combating_Comment_Spam page in the Codex.

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