Today I decided to disable comments and pingbacks on my WordPress blog because the ratio of spam to real comments was in the region of 200:1, I’ve tried various anti-spam comment pluggin’s but with only limited success. So enough was enough & I’ve disabled pingbacks & comments on my WordPress blog now.

It’s easy enough to do this for new posts:

1. Click Settings
2. Uncheck “Allow link notification from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” & “Allow people to post comment on new articles”

You will also want to go and disable this for all your old posts, here is a quick & easy way to do that:
1. Go to your “Posts” page
2. Expand “Screen Options”
3. Change the options so you have a good number of posts displayed.
4. Apply the “Screen Options” change.
5. Select all posts.
6. Select “Edit” in the drop down option & click “Apply”.
7. Set “Comments” to “Do not allow” (this disables comments).
8. Set “Pings” to “Do not allow” (this disables pingbacks).
9. Click “Update” to apply changes.

Note: if you didn’t select a high enough number for option 3 you will need to repeat this process on Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 & so on.

Now you have turned off pingbacks & comments this will reduce the amount of spam that finds it’s way to your WordPress blog – that was easy wasn’t it!