muse

So remember when I was complaining about comment spam? The bots have a hold of WordPress, and everytime you add a post, that means comments magically appear in your system.

So guess what that means when you import over 600 entries??

I have literally deleted about 9,000 comments this morning. For some stuff, I had to go into PHP MyAdmin and run the delete statements there - there were so many results returned that the database connection kept timing out on the search queries.

So for others who may have the same problem - I did a quick run through the source code and here is the query WordPress uses to view results from the comment search:

SELECT *
FROM  [your comment table]
WHERE comment_author LIKE  '%[search string]%' OR
comment_author_email LIKE  '%[search string]%' OR
comment_author_url LIKE  '%[search string]%' OR
comment_author_IP LIKE  '%[search string]%' OR
comment_content LIKE  '%[search string]%'

I changed the ‘SELECT *’ to a ‘DELETE’, ran it in PHP MyAdmin, and knocked out 5907 comments with the word ‘poker’. Yowza. You’re kinda playing Russian Roulette with your comments, but as all these words were on my old blacklist anyway, I’m not too worried about it.

If you’re looking to minimize comment spam on WordPress, check out the wiki: How to Combat Comment Spam With WordPress.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 9th, 2004 at 12:50 pm and is filed under General, WP Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.