Closing WordPress Comments on Posts Over 100 Days Old

I am closing WordPress comments on posts older than 100 days because in one day I was getting over 600 spam comments. I use Akismet and almost all spam comment are sent to the spam folder but I don’t want that sort of negative activity on my site.

Since closing WordPress comments on older posts the amount of spam I am getting is under 10 per day.

If you would like to ask a question about an older post, please use my contact form.

You can close comments after X number of days under Settings > Discussion > Other Comment Settings > Automatically Close Comments on Articles Older Than X Number of Days.

Closing WordPress Comments

Since I neglected my blog for so long, there aren’t many legitimate comments coming in right now so there is no reason to leave the old posts open for spammers to target.

You can also add the following function found via Jimmy’s Code to your theme’s functions file. This will display a message saying that comments will close after the number of days set in the discussion settings and a message for when comments are already closed. This function is specific to the Genesis Framework. If you are using a different theme you would change genesis_after_comment_form to comment_form_after in the add_action part.

add_action('genesis_after_comment_form', 'showcommentsopen');
function showcommentsopen() {
 $numdays = get_option('close_comments_days_old');
  if (is_single()) { // we are on a blog post...
    if (comments_open()) { // ...and comments are open...
      if ($numdays !== 0) { // ...but they are set to close after N days...
        echo 'The comment form will be available for ' . $numdays . 
           ' days from the date the article was published.

';
      }
    } else { // comments closed
      echo 'Comments are closed. Please <a href="https://www.kimwoodbridge.com/dev/contact/">contact me</a> for specific questions ' . ' or subscribe to my newsletter. 

';
    } // end open check
  } // end single check
}

Comments Open

Comments Closed

Do you still have comments open on your site? Do you close comments after a certain amount of time? Do you think a custom message for closed comments like in the function is useful?

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