Nov 20 2009
Those Stupid Spam Comments
For this blog, I have about 2,400 genuine comments for my posts. But guess how many spam comments that have found their way through? More than 27,000! Each time when I log into my blog, I will have to go through the comments and start clearing the spam ones. You know, those ones that pimp anything from viagra to porn to loans to even rosary beads.
Then, the forum that I have which is an extension of this blog, also have the same problem, which makes me think that maybe I shouldn’t have started it at all. Anyway, now that I have, it is kind of hard to close it down.
I also have another inactive blog on kids’ bed which had it even worse. It was under spam attack for days that the site couldn’t be accessed. The attack took away all the bandwidth as well as disk space. Well, I guess that’s what you will end up with when you have an avalanche of comments in the thousands all of a sudden.
And the thing with wordpress is you can only delete 20 comments at one go using the admin control dashboard. So, imagine having to go through 45,000 comments and delete 20 each time. How tiring is that?
Fed up, I had to google for an answer and found out that I can delete them by running a SQL query. Very techie stuff for an IT illiterate woman like me but what can I do when I’m sitting on over 45,000 stupid comments. Anyway, I got that done and I guess I also learned something new along the way.
Anyway, these days, I also take the liberty to delete comments that merely say “Great post!”, “I will visit again!” or simply “Thanks for the info!” from people I do not know. After blogging for quite some time, you can just sniff out a spam comment, I guess!
