I’ve been testing a batch of plugins recently – some requested by bloggers I host blogs for, some that I thought might be good. Unfortunately out of all the plugins I have been testing, only one works with the set up we are all using. That one is Comment Timeout – and in fact is the plugin I thought we’d have the most trouble with given that we do run a lot of comment plugins.
I think it was Lightening who mentioned somewhere around the place how much trouble she was having with spam on the blog. One of the things that I was getting a lot of was trackback spam where spammers are putting trackbacks to my posts with drug names and sex sites etc. It happens a lot on old posts. For example – yesterday there were 25 trackback spams. Today there were 2 – and that is because I allowed comments on posts which had more than xx number of comments. I’m going to turn that off and see if it reduces the spam to 0.
Comment Timeout gives you the ability to close comments on old posts as well as treat trackbacks like comments. We’ll be rolling it out across the blogs on Monday and Tuesday of next week, and I might put together a post on how to use it.
On the not so positive side, it means people can’t comment on your older popular posts. So it is a toss up – do you want to deal with spam, or do you want people to be able to comment on posts you wrote ages ago? For me it is a no brainer – get rid of the spam!
The other plugins broke stuff, so apologies all but they won’t be appearing on our blogs. Unless you want stuff to break, of course. ;)
I’m just wondering if it would be possible to keep a list of “tested and not compatible” plug-ins somewhere. Somewhere we could check if we’re wondering what has and hasn’t already been tested?
The comment timeout seems interesting. I’ve been getting a lot of spam on older comments, but since I moderate they don’t make on the blog. It would cut down on a bit of work from my end.
I LOVE comment timeout. I’ve been using it for quite some time, and it does do a remarkable job of cutting out a lot of spam comments. Couple that with the fact that I moderate all incoming comments, and my blog’s nicely spam-free.