Closing Time
Besides experimenting with threaded comments (I know it’s clunky; I’m working on it), a dhtml Flickr badge on my homepage, and a dynamic blogroll in my sidebar, I recently added a simple chunk of PHP that will automatically close comments on any post older than X days. I’m experimenting with a 14-day limit. This should be a good balance of time to where all the discussion can play out, but once the posts really get fully indexed in Google, the spam-bots can’t get to them.
I’m torn over whether this is even necessary, since I’ve never had a single spam message hit my comments. See, I require that everyone’s “first” comment ever be approved by me before it hits the main page. When I approve it, you get a cookie that lets you post all you want without me screening anything. So any comment spam that I get just ends up in this moderation queue anyway. But some days I get 10+ spam comments in the queue, and it’s a little annoying. So, I’m closing commenting on old posts. Rarely do I ever get a comment on anything older than a week or so, so this would seem to be a good idea. And if anyone wants me to re-open comments for a particular post, just say the word and I’ll do it.
Edit: Actually, I forgot that I had already installed hashcash. This should be enough. I guess I do want to encourage comments, even on old posts, so closing all of them might have been a bad idea…
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:58 pm
I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something like that. The CAPTCHA seemed appealing at first (mainly because I could pretty much just drop it in and have it work - oh, except that it ended up giving errors to some users inexplicably) but the more I think about it (and read about CAPTCHAs in general) the more I think it’s a bad idea. I know it may be annoying for people’s first comment to have to be approved, but it’s a one-time inconvenience, rather than having to type a security code in every time. It also doesn’t have the concommitant accessibility concerns that CAPTCHAs do. Another alternative is forcing a Preview before submitting the comment. Anyway… whether I do that or require approval for the first comment, I’ll have to whip out some more PHP skillz, but I’m okay with that.
Hmm, instead of rambling in your comments section, I should probably post this on my own blog.
Good idea about closing comments after a certain amount of time as a deterrent… but personally I would be hesitant to do that. I think it can be fun and amusing to randomly get comments on old threads, and sometimes have that result in a discussion opening back up.
December 22nd, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Exactly. Setting a cookie works perfectly since evil spam robots don’t have that ability. You should check out that hashcash thing I linked to, too. It’s a complicated approach, but it’s very cool. It makes your browser do a little javascript calculation based on a random number in order to enable the Submit button.
In summary, I implemented the “must have an approved comment in order to post” flag so that spammers could never get comments directly onto my blog, and I plugged in the hashcash function when I got annoyed with the amount of spam in my moderation queue.
December 22nd, 2005 at 2:22 pm
Interesting… I never thought of doing anything like that; and strangely enough, I do get spam, even though I didn’t know it. I just found out a couple of days ago when I got a junk comment, and looked to find that I have hundreds of them that MT blocks. Pretty cool!
December 23rd, 2005 at 10:24 am
Well, hashcash is a Wordpress plug-in; surely you haven’t forgotten that I don’t use no stinkin’ Wordpress..?
January 3rd, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Yes, I know that it’s a Wordpress plug-in… But it’s PHP. I was just saying you should look at what they do. I imagine it wouldn’t be ridiculously hard to reverse-engineer…