WordPress/wordcamp.org

Prevent & clean up spam comments on legacy wordcamp sites

Opened this issue · 6 comments

jonoalderson commented

Pages like https://kathmandu.wordcamp.org/2018/wordcamp-kathmandu-2018-tickets/ are a magnet for spam comments. That's problematic for our SEO, analytics, and general quality of life.

We should address this by:

  • Closing comments on all posts on historical (i.e., non-current/future) WordCamp sites
  • Optionally; setting comments to disabled by default on current/future WordCamp sites
  • Deleting spam (or all?) comments
dd32 commented

Once a WordCamp is closed, disabling commenting makes sense to me.

Likewise, if the event site is not the most recent one, I think it'd make sense to disable Jetpack contact forms too.

dd32 commented

Noting I've enabled Automatically close comments on posts older than 30 days on the site in question, and run akismet re-check for spam (Which only caught 75 additionals..).

That should've been enabled by default, so it's likely that the organisers disabled that.

jonoalderson commented

Super, thanks! 😄

jonoalderson commented

Can we close comments on all sites?

Seeing lots of submissions on pages like https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/additional-sponsorship-opportunities-released/27859955302_dcccbca1e9_h/.

dd32 commented

This is relatively low-priority IMHO.

Seeing lots of submissions on pages like https://europe.wordcamp.org/2022/additional-sponsorship-opportunities-released/27859955302_dcccbca1e9_h/.

  • That has no comments on it?
  • The last submitted comment on that site is from 2022/07/10 at 7:14 pm.
  • Automatically close comments on posts older than 30 days is already enabled on that site.
    • I still see a comment form on the above URL though..

I imagine Akismet is dealing with the spam and the analytics is not.

jonoalderson commented

We're trying to build a better understanding of if/how these sites are performing (for users, for the community, etc), and our analytics data is currently polluted by the submission attempts on these.

It's also a not-insignificant SEO issue; one of hundreds which add up to contribute to the problem described here and here.

(I'd write a more comprehensive ticket to make sure that we only track relevant/successful interactions via GTM, but that'd be far more complicated, and far less likely to get actioned)