how do you stop spammers yet keep comments on?

1. To properly turn off comments, uncheck the option in Options/Discussions (this only disables comments on future posts), then edit each past post and remove the comment option from each. To quickly and efficiently deactive comments, delete the wp-comments-post.php file.

2. To prevent spam: https://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/spam/

Actually, you can do the MySQL query and change all the post “comment_status” to ‘closed’

Shiner25, if you installed WordPress 1.5 you made a great start. Under the Options -> Discussion Tab is where you can set things up.

I’ve allowed comments, trackbacks and pingbacks by checking # Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) and # Allow people to post comments on the article in the Usual settings for an article: section.

FWIU, in WP 1.5 all comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks are treated the same. So if you select under the Before a comment appears section, # Comment author must fill out name and e-mail and # Comment author must have a previously approved comment all comments will need to be approved by you. As you mark post approved or SPAM you will begin to see less and less SPAM and more and more legitimate comments will be automaticall approved.

You can also add words including name, URI, e-mail, or IP to be blacklisted. Posts which contain anything contained in the blacklist you will never see. Also, you can enable WP 1.5 to automatically blacklist comments made from from open and insecure proxies which are not legitimate sources for comments.

Over time that should do a bang up job. But you can also install plugins to augment the process.

On my 1.2 blog, I did something like change the name of the comments file or something so that bots couldn’t look for it. Would this work in 1.5? What file would I change? comment-functions.php perhaps? More importantly, what other files would refer to this that I would have to update? My filter is catching the spam, but I don’t wanna have to delete the same thing over and over like I’m doing now.

UPDATE: I’m now getting NO spam with this method! ??