There are many ways of reducing spam, you can download all the plugins and start activating them. But why not just shut off comments and pings for posts that have almost no chance of people commenting anyway?
In order to reduce spam, I start disallowing comments and pings for posts before 2007 that has receive comments. Since it hasn’t got any comments for so long, it’s probably a boring or personal (not mutually exclusive of course) post so I’ll just disallow comments and pings.
SQL Statement to close comments and pings:
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed' WHERE `comment_count` = 0 AND `post_date` < "2006-12-31 00:00:00"
The above SQL statement finds all the posts before 2007 with no comments and closes all the comment and ping discussion. I hope that would minimize the amount of incoming spam per day. Use the above command at your own risk, make sure you know what you are doing. You might have named the table wp_posts differently from me.
I use in on WordPress 2.3.1 (latest version).
With that SQL command, 430 of my 1663 posts have their comments and pings closed.
It’s a little depressing to log in and see Akismet catch 1000s of spam per day. To date, Akismet has protected //beconfused from 142,299 spam comments. Akismet just updated their plugin too by the way.
[...] Outlook ârulesâ can only do so much. So I decided to research some other ways to reduce spam. For those of us who blog one option can be to turn off the comments option on older posts When I was looking for other ways on line to reduce spam I found an interesting site. [...]
by Toolkit for Success (Dec 19, 2007 at 1 PM)