From my experience, one thing that most spammers do is try to post comments, pingbacks or trackbacks on your extremely old posts.
If you are not monitoring the comments, pingbacks or trackbacks on your site properly, you will not even realize that these have been posted.
Many a times, you would not want anyone to post a comment or a pingback on an extremely old post, especially on personal blogs.
WordPress has no inbuilt system of closing comments on old posts. This is where the plugin steps in.
Auto-Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks will close comments, pingbacks and trackbacks on your post automatically at intervals set by you. You can also choose to disable the schedule and run it manually whenever you choose to.
Read more and download Auto-Close Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks. If you find the plugin useful, please do drop in your contribution.
I understand why one would want to close comments on older posts, but I’d like to disagree … a couple of times recently I’ve discovered a blog because an old post popped up as a search result. (That happened recently when I was searching for “beer” … don’t ask!)
It’s still good information, and a good discussion … it just started some time ago. Not sure that it’s always a good idea to cut off those discussions.
I am afraid I have to agree with Cornelia Moore there, quite often I stumbled upon old posts and wish to have more information regarding the topic from the writer, all I did was leaving message in the comment box, and I got pretty good response.
But Thanks for the info anyway, I might need it for some of my niche blogs.
Actually, I’m working on enhancing the plugin a bit to add the feature of allows to keep certain posts open.
Would it be a possible use then?
That sounds like a very useful feature, and that flexibility would make it more valuable.
There are times when you get some quality trackbacks and pingbacks for one of your least expected posts. We’ll be risking that (believe it or not, some people do check at what pingbacks we’ve received to posts!) apart from a good discussion like Cornelia and Budhi mentioned.
Why is it a good idea to stop valid comments on old posts? You never know it may spark up a new discussion.
What interval have you set the plugin to?
Thanks,
Mike
I set it to close posts 90 days old. Most of my posts on this blog are personal and I wouldn’t really bother much about comments on these.
I think I can add some functionality into the plugin to open certain posts.