I shut the comment down yesterday. Today, I woke up to two more spam comments claiming to be two of my regular posters. I thought that I shut it down correctly, but then I realized that the “disallow comment” setting is not retroactive.

I found this post, which helped me deal with this issue. In short, you have to run a very simple SQL query against your WordPress wp_posts table:

UPDATE wp_posts p SET comment_status = ‘closed’,
ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’

With that done, I’m going to leave comments open on my latest posts, and manually close them after a week or so. My next task is to find a way to do this automatically . If you have any suggestions on how to accomplish this, I’d appreciate it.

To you spammers: My most frequent commentators are my friends and family. I know the email addresses that they use. I look at every single comment that hits this blog. Please stop trying to pose as them - you are wasting your time.

Edit: I was getting ready to implement the solutions provided by Doug and Joe. Then I saw one of the comments made by someone posting as Tito:

I would recommend the Comment Timeout Plug in. Or the core solution.

I can’t believe I overlooked WordPress’ built-in function. I enabled it, and it seems to be working.