Prevent & clean up spam comments on legacy wordcamp sites

[jonoalderson]

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]

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]

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]

Super, thanks! 😄

[jonoalderson]

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]

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]

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)