Minimizing Spam Comments

I have WP-Spamfree plugin installed on this blog to filter spam comments and it had so far blocked 17,257 in the twenty-five (25) months that this site has existed. That is a monthly average of 690 spam comments with higher figures in later months. Good enough? Not quite, because aside from those spam comments that I never got to see because they are filtered off automatically, there are still some one-hundred (100) manually-entered spam comments that get to my dashboard for moderation.

What are these manually-entered spam comments that I need to review and delete one-by-one? These are comments under moderation that have subjects or topics instead of the author’s name, fictitious email addresses and comments that say “good job”, “nice site”, “found you on Bing”, etc. Because these spam comments are mixed with the real ones, I really have to go through them one-by-one before I could send them to trash then delete.

For more than six (6) months now, these spam comments seem to increase by the day. I do not know the exact reason but I suspect that it could be because of the PageRank 4 that this blog has. I also have an unranked or PR0 blog and it is not getting any spam comment. I tend to believe also that there are some entities paying the spammers for the comments that they can get posted on high PR blogs.

To minimize the spams, I decided to close for comments all articles that are more than thirty (30) days old. I know that the move could affect those who have questions on my old posts but I had to do it or else, my time would be wasted in reviewing spam comments. I suggest that if you have any question on any of my old topics on this blog, use “Contact Me” and I will do my best to reply to your queries.