Holy cannoli! I must have received in excess of 2,000 spam comments in the space of two hours yesterday. As soon as I would zap them from the moderation queue, there would be just as many new ones. I thought that I could simply shut down the comment feature for the entire blog until things calmed down. Accordingly, I scoured my WordPress homepage and did not find any way to disable the comment feature for the blog. There is a feature that requires people to register and another one to disable comments on posts older than X days, but nothing to simply shut comments (all comments) off.

A regular reader, Bill, noodled around and found this site with instructions for disabling the comments, but, the “fix” would require me to rummage around in codey places I dare not go. Besides, turning the comments back on would require again diving into the world of scary code.

Seeing as how I don’t pay anything for WordPress, I don’t feel very righteous about complaining, but a simple “Comments On,” “Comments Off” feature would be handy.

I’m happy to report that things are back to normal today, with the usual number of spam comments making it through the spam blocker but being caught in the moderation queue.