Lest any regulars feel puzzled when they encounter this: I just enabled WordPress to turn off commenting on posts over 30 days old.
Funny is being flooded with spam from those obscenely underpaid Third-World workers who are hired to enter advertising comments on random posts, presumably found by Web-bots. Because they’re live human beings typing real (but irrelevant) comments and entering real-looking (but fake) names and e-mail addresses, they get past the spam-catchers. This garbage adds mightily to the 100-plus messages a day that come pouring into my in-box; I’m getting tired of deleting the stuff—it just absorbs time and pushes up the annoyance quotient.
{sigh} Most of these are coming in on pretty old comments. I don’t want to disable commenting or make it password-protected, so I’m hoping this strategy works. If not, I’ll have to shorten the window for commenting to two weeks.
Anyway, if you get a message saying it’s too late to comment on some post, you’ll know what’s up.
Image:
Brent and MariLynn, The Spam-mobile. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Did you try putting up a Captcha plug in to work with your WP-SpamFree…really has helped on my site
hah! love the picture!
@ sandra jensen: It is a superb piece of art, isn’t it?
@ Evan: That crossed my mind. But from what I understand, these things that respond directly or obliquely to your content are being sent by actual human beings, working for a few pennies an hour out of Third-World countries. They have been trained to copy the Captcha characters, even if their native languages don’t include roman fonts. That’s why they’re getting through WP-SpamFree and Akismet.