Hey Justin!

I didn’t know there was a plug in to close out old comment sections, Rachel C has been doing it by hand as asked. I tried, but My SQL is not a place I want to press okay or enter.

A WP blog I administer get’s hit hard with spam, there were 743 within less than 48 hours. They go into the moderation cue but I still have to delete them. They go into the trash in the email but I still have to sort and delete because all email goes to trash.

Spam wasn’t a problem when you hosted me before, I never realized how lucky I had it.:^)

If I decide to renew, I’ll be in touch. Right now I’m so fed up I don’t know if it’s worth it to keep going.
Bless you buddy, I’ll be in touch on way or the other.

There’s also an MT plugin (I don’t use MT, so I don’t keep up with it) that will close the comments on old posts after a while - should be a good timesaver if you want to use that technique.

I administer about 60 WordPress-powered sites and can do the migration for you (painlessly) if you are interested in hosting ($4US/mo) - just email me.

Good luck, at any rate.

It looks like you are renaming you comment posting script. That’s a good start.

Don’t link to your comment script from the front page. Have the ‘Comments’ link go to your individual archive entry at the comment section.

I tend to think numeric permalinks are too easy to spam. Ie. 001794.php, 001793.php, 001792.php. The script to iterate that is trivial.

If you aren’t already, close old entries’ comment status.

Don’t put a text badge that advertises you use Movable Type on your page. If I were a script kiddy, I’d Google on the “powered by MT” string and get a nice list of targets to attack.

The last one is somewhat controversial but I’ve found it works well. Get yourself delisted from the major search engines by means of the appropriate META tags (or robots.txt) that tell the search engine bots not to index your page. Your search engine page rank will fall, but you are so blogroll listed, you’ll still get readers from their referals.

And I have great respect for guys like Jay Allen who worked so hard to prevent comment spam.
Reading his last piece, the spammers won this round.

Seems fruitless to get frustrated, there are a lot of people working to eliminate this garbage. RSS feeders have told Google blogger they won’t be listed if they don’t stop spam blogs.

Complaining about spam is like complaining about raking leaves in the fall, spammers aren’t going to stop or be stopped. At best all we can do is find good rakes. In some cases, honking leaf blowers.:^)