I recently ran into a couple of situations where I wished I could have stopped comments on my blogs without having to lose any of the other settings. A recent comment flood attempt comes to mind.
Dougal came up with the wonderful Spammer Tar Pit plugin to temporarily stop the floods and that plugin gave me some ideas that I put together into another set of plugins.
The “Stop Comments” plugin temporarily turns off comments for your whole blog without affecting individual settings for each of the posts. In other words, if at some time you want to stop people from commenting on your blog for a certain period of time, simply activate this plugin and all comments are dropped with a polite message. Once you are ready to turn them on again, simply deactivate this plugin and you are done.
The “Take Down Blog” plugin is a one liner. If for some reason you want to prevent people from reaching your blog, just activate this plugin and your readers will get a polite message asking them to come back soon and nothing else. This could be further refined with html pages and such.
Both these plugins can be downloaded here. Installation is as simple as copying the contents of the zip file to your wp-content/plugins directory.
Please leave comments and feedback.
[EDIT] I messed up with the files and uploaded the zip with the wrong files. If you downloaded the plugins recently, please download them again to get the right version. Sorry for the mistake.
Good plugins. I think I was hit by the same flood attempt you mention, fortunately my blacklist caught it.
Take Down Blog is something that might be useful — the other day I fiddled with my RSS feed, (hiding a category), and all RSS subscribers will have seen it “reboot” every other second. Do you know whether this plugin would prevent that?
for the “stop comments” plugin, instead of killing the whole blog when you want to disable commenting on the blog, maybe disable wp-comments, replace the comments form with a message that commenting is temporarily unavailable, and trigger the delay only when someone is trying to post a comment.
The stop comment plugin should stop just the commenting. The blog should still work as it should. Only when someone tries to post a comment does it kill the process.
maybe i’m using the wrong plugin then. i downloaded the off.zip file and it contains 2 files, pissoff.php and blogoff.php. when i activate the Piss off plugin it shuts the whole blog down.
Mark,
The Take Down Blog is great! Now some folks can more quickly take down their sites when they have a hissy-fit!
You rock, Mark.
BTW, where’s that $500 you owe me? 😉
Crap. No wonder people are confused. I included the wrong files. Sorry charles. Download the plugins now. There should be a blogoff.php and a commentsoff.php now inside the zip file.
Sorry again everyone.
it’s ok mark. that’s one of the reasons i replied with a description of the files i had.
Cool Plugins Mark. Thanks.
I was hit by 3 waves of Comment Spam yesterday & I wished I had checked on here earlier, so that I would have got these plugins in place & thus would’ve had less trouble than I did have.
Still, I’m now prepared should that sneak come back. 😉
I downloaded the files a few days ago, but commentsoff locked me out when I logged out and tried to log back in. Had to rename the file to login.
The ‘Stop Comments’ plugin is very helpful. Thank You !
Thanks. Pity commentsoff.php doesn’t hide the comments form though. I hate to think of people writing a comprehensive repiy only to be told comments are not being accepted.
Tested the comment stop plugin on WordPress version 2.5 still works! The other did not. Thank you.
Looks like it doesn’t work in 2.7. Prevents you from logging in to the Admin area – had to disable the plug-in by changing the file name.