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.

Well, I did a little research on importing HaloScan comments to WordPress. I was actually just going to post this as a comment on Laura-Cat’s site, but I wasn’t sure the comments were working. Which will probably make me an evil multi-comment poster, and I know how much we all hate those.

Looks like Raving Madness has taken a crack at pulling this off, but judging by user comments, I can’t tell if it’s effective. The WordPress forums aren’t very optimistic, either. I know HaloScan allows comment exports, so if someone can show me an example of the export, maybe I can hack a script together.

Of course, if it was that easy, someone would have done it already.