Banner for Old Posts
From time to time, every Weblog sees someone coming in from a search engine and making a comment that is no longer … how you say … timely.
For example: I wrecked my truck almost two years ago, and someone today searching for “totaled WRX” found my entry and urged me to buy a WRX wagon. That’s not real timely.
What I’m thinking would be nice would be to throw a banner up by the comment box that tells the user, “Hey! This is an old entry!” if the entry’s older than N days. People are going to ignore metadata like date published, etc., in these situations, but something that would [tastefully] stand out and say, “Yoohoo!” would be good.
I ran the idea by Alex, and while I at first suggested a JavaScript powered popup, he steered me towards a function in PHP. I think this would be an easy WordPress plugin to write, and so does Alex.
I’ll throw this on my idea pile, but if anyone wants to implement it up before I get to it—which, given what I’ve found out about work in the last, oh, four hours, could be … 2006—feel free! Don’t give me credit in the plugin, but a link on the download page or in the WordPress wiki would be nice.
Now, if you’ll pardon me, I’m going to go home and do something completely unrelated to a computer for a while.
Implemented and in your inbox.
July 7th, 2004 at 8:03 pmIs there a way to simply close the post for comments after a designated “N” days?
July 8th, 2004 at 8:15 amAlex: Who’s the prince now, chief?
Todd: Unfortunately, no; I think someone may have written a plugin for v1.2+ that does do this, but I’m not sure. That’s certainly a good bit of functionality to have as well—it’s something that Greymatter had waaaaaaaaaaay back in 1999 or 2000.
July 8th, 2004 at 8:50 amI’ve had some really interesting comments on old posts, I don’t know why you’d want to close them.
July 8th, 2004 at 11:20 amI’ve had a 60/40 good/bad history with old posts getting comments. Of course, what I find good is sometimes just damn funny to me …
July 8th, 2004 at 11:24 amWell from personal experience I get the viagra, lipitor, levitra all those types of comments on the older posts. The majority are older than 30 days.
July 8th, 2004 at 2:35 pmThat’s what comment moderation’s for.
You should upgrade to WordPress v1.2.
July 8th, 2004 at 2:38 pmComment spam is a different problem with different solutions.
July 8th, 2004 at 4:44 pmSolutions to problems like that don’t come easy to guys who know as little as I do about weblog and setting them up. I don’t know Jack. Geof and Sarah did all the work for me.
July 9th, 2004 at 12:41 pm