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I have an ongoing problem with comments being added to old posts. I know that I can manually change each post to close comments, but with posts going back >2 years, that's a lot of work!
Is there a setting along the lines of "close posts to comments after X days" that I can automate this with? I have looked, but not found it.
Just wondering if someone knew a quicker/more efficient way to do this.
There is a setting to close off old comments to a more stringent standard against spammers, but not to close comments, in general.
Under Settings---> Discussion---> Leave the box "Don’t discard spam on old posts" unticked.
I don't believe there is a option to close comments automatically after
a certain amount of x days...
but would be a nice feature I would like to see added
It's been requested over and over. The self-hosted blogs have a plug-in to do it. If you want this here - and I certainly think it's a great idea - please let the folks in support know.
I understand the rationale because spammers tend to hit old posts quite frequently, but we're all using Akismet. It does a pretty good job of catching them and as diamondfistwerny pointed out if you really want to, there is an available setting to override this.
But other than spammers hopefully caught by Akismet, maybe I'm missing why comments on old posts are a problem.
Mostly, because I write a science blog, it means people attack information posted 2 years ago as incorrect--even though I have posted since then with the newly published information.
Or, I have to keep returning to things posted some time ago because some new crank shows up to tell me about God, harmonic convergence, EMF radiation, or some other alternative explanation for natural phenomenon that I discuss.
Basically, it just sucks time away from what I'm writing this month, as opposed to last year, or even 2005.
(The "maggots are coming out of my skin halp!1!" overly-sharing comments I now deal with under the new "bug girl will not diagnose you" policy :D
Most of those do show up on the older posts, though.)
In that case, comment moderation should work. You can mass delete comments if you so choose.
Also, if you update info, using a trackback to your previous post will let people know there's new info.
But you are right, it's a timesuck no matter how you look at it.
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