Ever since I’ve opened commenting to the public (anonymous users) last November, we’ve been getting some spam comments at random posts. Lately, the number of spam comments has been increasing. Fortunately, pretty much all have them had been placed in the Moderation Queue because they contained at least one common comment spam word. I’ve been getting emails each morning for the last couple weeks telling me there are comments awaiting moderation. (WordPress provides a nice interface for moderating comments and marking them as spam).

To prevent the noise in my email and in WordPress, I have decided to once again close public commenting, so that only registered users can post comments. Note that anyone can still register if they want to.

If our blog starts seeing higher usage again and attracting more anonymous users, then we can re-open public commenting. However, since this is mainly an internal blog, used primarily by our small group, there is little need to open our doors when nobody is appearing, and at the expense of combating spam every day.