Works For Me: Closing Comments

Remember, in two weeks we'll be having Works-For-Me Wednesday: The Car Edition. Give us your best tips for handling life on the go. How to entertain the kids, or keep up with your little league gear, or how to stock an auto first aid kit...let us know what works for you.

I really hesitate to share this tip with you, because I'm so afraid the Internet Trolls (you know, the ones who sell Via*gra! Cheap! and Legal!) will figure me out and ruin my nice little shortcut.  So I'm crossing my fingers and, in my mind, shooing away all the trolls. 

My blogging platform, Typepad, does offer spam protection on its comments.  But it's clunky, requiring readers to go to another screen altogether to enter a word-verification.  PLUS, it wasn't protecting me entirely from spam; I was still having to go through and delete a good bit with regularity.

A few months ago, it dawned on me that spam comments generally appear on older posts only (not sure why).  Add to this that it's very rare that a legitimate commenter posts a comment on an older post, and the obvious solution became clear:  I turned off comments on anything posted more than two weeks ago.  I took the clunky word verification feature off (for which many readers were thankful!) and I have not had a single spam comment since.  I just have to remember, every few days, to click through and turn off the comments on the older posts.  Easy.

If you're a Typepad user, you know that turning off comments is easy.  At your "list posts" page, you select the posts for which you want to turn off comments (and note, this doesn't delete the comments already there, it just won't let any new ones appear), and then choose "close comments" in the action bar at the bottom of the page. 

As for you folks on Blogger and other platforms, I'm afraid I'm not much help.  I vaguely recall, from my Blogger days, that this was possible, but if anyone wants to post instructions in my comments section below, I would be oh-so-grateful.

Works for me!

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