Only getting non-sense comments on my WordPress blog

  • Resolved EricBuist

    (@ericbuist)


    10 years, 8 months ago

    Hi,

    I am only getting non-sense, sometimes not intelligible at all, text as comments from random users on my WordPress blog. I am more and more feeling many people don’t like my contents and instead of telling it to me clearly and letting me improve things, send random stuff until it drives me mad and I shut down my blog. I am approaching this point now.

    Each comment results in an e-mail notification on my smartphone which beeps and when I look for the email, this is nothing of any use. I don’t want to turn off email notification because of that since this is now the only source of problematic emails I get. GMail’s anti-spam does a pretty good job. I searched for a way to filter mails: nothing on the smartphone can do it, so I would need to change email account to a provider supporting server-side filtering. The only solutions I know for this would be an Exchange server (with Microsoft’s Outlook client for which I don’t have a license) or a dedicated IMAP server with Procmail. I guess most if not no free email services will provide that.

    All my searches converge to Akismet, but I don’t want to pay for an activation key. I thought WordPress would be free and even open source, but if it relies on non-free extensions to be convenient, this is just a non-sense. I got rid of Joomla for that reason: its editor was too basic and I would have had to pay to get a decent one. Now same thing starts happening for WordPress.

    I tried installing a combination of Bad Behavior and bcSpamBlock, that seemed to work, but I found out a few weeks ago that this prevents some people to send comments, and that prevented me from replying to a comment, no matter hard I tried. Disabling bcSpamBlock solved this, but unwanted comments started over.

    I investigated the possibility of disabling comments, because I am not getting ANY constructive comments at all. The only thing I could do globally was to restrict comments to registered users. However, some people are using TrackBack to send the comments, and that cannot be restricted to registered users. Comments and TrackBack can only be disabled for new posts. I would have to edit existing posts one by one.

    I found a while ago a way to edit the MySQL database to disable the comments for all existing posts, but that’s a no-go for me since I installed WordPress using the automated scripts so I don’t have any clue of the password used to lock the DB. I would have to reset the password, or maybe even recreate the DB (and loose every post!), and then reconfigure WordPress to use the new password. Even if I can get access to the DB, the MySQL command I saw to turn off comments had no sense for me, so I would have to blindly copy/paste it, and copy/pasting from a web site is not reliable for me at all. Sometimes I miss the first or last characters when I select the text so it takes me a while to get the selection, and then if sometimes is missing, the command just fails, so it is a never-ending process.

    It seems I don’t have enough experience and patience to maintain my own blog. I started a WordPress blog to make better use of my HostPapa web account than hosting just static HTML pages, but from this bad experience with undesired comments and lack of flexibility to turn them off, I would have been better off with Blogger who imposes to have a Google account to comment on posts. Blogger didn’t have the categories at the moment I tried it, but I would be ready to create one blog per category if needed since I need only two or three categories.

    Is there any other way that manually moving around all my posts to a new blog? I would need one of the following

    • An extension to disable comments and TrackBack for new AND existing posts.
    • A (semi-)automated way to migrate my contents from WordPress to Blogger.
    • An email account supporting server-side filtering without having me to search forever for a tiny checkbox or button on a cluttered web interface to turn on.
    • Or at least a way to stop getting these useless comment notifications without having to turn off my e-mail notifications on my smartphone. Maybe other Android email applications than GMail would have client-side filtering, or maybe I need to take a breath and switch over to iPhone.

    If I cannot find anything, I will eventually either shut down the blog or configure filters in a Thunderbird client hooked up to my GMail account and let it run forever.

    Thanks for any help.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • … but that’s a no-go for me since I installed WordPress using the automated scripts so I don’t have any clue of the password used to lock the DB. I would have to reset the password, …

    You can dig the username and password out of your wp-config.php

    Hi,
    What do you mean by ”All my searches converge to Akismet, but I don’t want to pay for an activation key” ?
    The activation key for Akismet is free, you just have to register with your e-mail, and once you have your API key, you can use it for multiple sites.
    I’ve been using Akismet for years on over 50 websites, and while the occasional “Great post! Thanks” comment gets accepted, all “Get your free Cialis today” comments are automatically rejected.
    Hope this helps,
    Daniel.

    Thread Starter EricBuist

    (@ericbuist)

    Finally could get this worked around. I disabled comments and trackbacks for new posts and enabled automatic disactivation of comments for posts older than 14 days, so all old posts will get configured automatically for no comments. Moreover, I found the option to disable sending of email notifications for each comment, so at least I don’t get junk anymore in my mailbox. Moreover, I found out that GMail has support for filtering emails but only when accessed from gmail.com on a PC, not from the GMail app on a smartphone. Google’s fragmentation (different platforms have different functioanlities) is another issue, completely separate from this one. Also found out that I could create a new database user from my cPanel and bind it to the WP database, so I would then be able to manipulate the DB with SQL queries. I won’t need that for now, but at least it’s possible.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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