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Highly recommend: Wordpress Comment Timeout Plugin

In the past couple months I’ve been having spam troubles at Liquid Designs. Even though Akismet was blocking 99.99% of the thousand or so spams the site was getting every day, there would always be one or two that would get through, and they were almost always trackbacks. Spammers were targeting old posts, too, thinking that would somehow make it easier to slip by. I needed to stop allowing comments on old posts in order to stop this spam.

I looked up automatic-comment-closing plugins for Wordpress and found a fresh one for Wordpress 2+, Comment Timeout. I’m here to let you know that regardless of whether or not you need to close comments on old posts, if you have a Wordpress blog you need this plugin. It allows you to:

• Close comments on posts based on age or time since the last comment.
• Limit the number of comments on every post.
• Apply these settings to trackbacks.
• Apply these settings to pages and images.
• Close comments to IP addresses that have X or more comments in the moderation queue (this is great defense against spam runs).
• Reject all comments that contain BBCode.
• Reject comments where the user-agent differs from the original page request (great against bots).

If it isn’t obvious already, this comments has useful features for every kind of blog. I’m certain that it’s a great tool alongside any spam protection a blog may have, and any blog that gets even a little bit of traffic should have it.