If you are tired of cleaning up all of the spam from your wordpress install, it is time to check if you have trackbacks and pingbacks enabled on your posts. If you do, you are leaving a door open for spammers to spam your comments. A quick way to clean this up is to disable trackbacks and pingbacks on all new posts.
Disable trackbacks and pingbacks on all new posts:
- Log into your wp-admin section
- Click Settings
- Click Discussion
- Under “Default article settings”, uncheck “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)”
Now that trackbacks and pingbacks are disabled, it’s time to go back to all of your old posts and disable trackbacks and pingbacks there as well. Go to each of your posts and make sure the Discussion section is visible by using “Screen Options”.
Uncheck “Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this page”.
If you have a lot of posts and are comfortable with mySQL, you can perform a query to set the ping_status on all of your posts to closed. You can do so by executing the following query. Be sure to substitute the correct table name for wp_posts.
Please make a backup of your database!
update wp_posts set ping_status = 'closed';
Let me know how this works out for you!
