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.

The spammers have been using a dirty trick lately - they are posting comments under the names of my most frequent commentators.

It is bad enough that I have had well over 130,000 spam comments hit my blog, but this is a new low. I will be closing all comments across the site in an attempt to get them to focus their attention elsewhere. This is only temporary; I love hearing from all of you, but since the frequency of new posts is so low I don’t think this will hurt the blog too much.

When I open them up again, I’ll let you know.

I’ve decided to leave comments open on my latest posts, and close all of the older ones.

I heard a rumor that I have a blog. With tomorrow being April Fool’s Day, I thought someone was setting me up for a gag.

I took a look around the web and came across this blog. I figured this is the one the rumor mongers were talking about, since it has my name on it and everything.

You’d think that if it were really my blog, I’d post more often, right?