Google seems to love me, and there appear to be many dorks who find their way to old posts through Google and feel compelled to comment on something written 18 months ago.

I would like to close all comments older than, say, 90 days (or some arbitrary number of days). Can't find a way to do it, though.

I found two methods (1,2), but both are for MT weblogs set up with MySQL. Mine is set up with the default Berkeley DB support.

So: Anyone have a way to change the Comments setting to "Closed" for all posts older than X days on a MT 2.63 installation with the Berkeley DB set up?

Thanks!

If you ask me, there is nothing more annoying than comments which have been closed only due to age of the post.

I will give you an example: a long time ago, I wrote up a hack which explained how to get rid of target="_blank" in the MTCommentAuthorLink, because it ruins XHTML-strict validation. Subsequently, many people linked to it.

I realized that people were still employing this hack, even though it is obsolete for v2.6+ thanks to the sanitize attribute. So, I did a Google search on all pages linking to mine or pages which detailed the hack but did not link to mine. On all found pages, I posted the updated information. Some people retired comments by date, so I was unable to comment, leaving later Googlers with bad information.

I did the same thing recently with the (complete) fix for the MT bookmarklet for Safari.

Closing comments just because the entry is old is a bad idea. If you want to educate Googlers, you can use the MT-RefSearch plugin (http://www.sixapart.com/log/2002/12/mtrefsearch_v07.shtml) and modify the text to explain that they are on an old archive page. The plugin will provide them with relevant on-site search results and may give them an indication that there is more recent and relevant content.

Closing comments because of the occasional comment spam is throwing the baby out with the bathwater...

Thanks for the feedback, Jay.

However, I feel the vast majority of my old posts don't really need comments in the first place (unfortunately, I didn't select to turn them off when I imported them from Blogger). I am really not interested in participating in or even propagating discussion around 95% of my old posts; they don't exist for that purpose. In my situation, the value gained from keeping comments open does not outweigh the annoyance of comment spam.

Ergo, the question again: Anyone have a way to change the Comments setting to "Closed" for all posts older than X days on a MT 2.63 installation with the Berkeley DB set up?

Thanks in advance for any technical help in solving this need.

--g

Gritter, try this

Edited: Oops, I realized after posting this that you wanted a method for Berkeley DB. The one I posted is for MySQL. I'm afraid I don't know any method for Berkeley