August 16, 2010 If you’re getting a fair bit of spam on older blog posts, you may want to disable commenting on posts older than a year or two. Because your posts are still indexed by search engines, you’ll still be getting traffic there, but you may not want the burden of answering questions on posts that are obsolete.
You can easily do this in less than a minute with this SQL query. Sign in to phpmyadmin for your WordPress database and run this query:
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'closed' WHERE post_date < '2009-01-01' AND post_status = 'publish';
You can change the date to whatever suits your site’s needs.
Source: Perishable Press
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…or you could just go to the admin panel and set the option “Automatically close comments on articles older than xx days”. Found under Settings->Discussion.
Could someone please check the tab order of the comment form? Goes name -> Comment text area -> Mail -> Somewhere else -> Website
I’ve always thought closing older posts was a silly idea but I can see why some folks would want to do that. My most commented post is over a year old and still gets comments every so often.
Thanks, thats a great idea. I always wonder why is “E-mail me whenever” is default on “Anyone posts a comment”. I got around 1000 mails a day, until I learn that I can turn off mail on new comments. :) Deleting 1000 mails a day is hard work. :)
Thanks for the great tip, but would you know how to do the same thing across multiple tables at the same time? I’m running wpmu and I need to know how to do this for hundreds of blogs on one site. The tables are set up with wp_(blogid)_post. I tried doing a query exactly like yours except instead I tried
UPDATE wp_*_post SET …
This gives me a #1064 SQL Syntax error.
Do you know of a way to do this? It would be extremely helpful!