Bulk Retroactive Removal of Wordpress Spam

kingofsp

kingofsp

WF Premium Member
Mar 1, 2008
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Los Angeles
So, a blog I ignored for a long time started getting traffic that I didn't realize until recently. Along with traffic, it is also getting comments. The problem is, it is also has about 100,000 spam comments in the queue.

I activated Akismet and tried to do the "check for spam" but it just times out on a blank page (site.com/wp-admin/admin.php?action=akismet_recheck_queue) after about 10 seconds or so and nothing is marked as spam or deleted.

Looking around online I found a couple other people with the same problem but no solution that worked for me. I know I could just delete all the comments in phpmyadmin, but I don't want to lose the legit ones.

Has anyone else been through this?
 


eh, I was going to suggest deleting them using phpadmin, but I see you already thought of that. There's also a bulk delete plugin, not sure if it will just do comments - but either way, it means going through and picking out the legit comments to keep. My two cents - just dump it all, including the legit ones, as you won't be missing much since you did not realize it was even getting any attention - I've got a few like that too :)
 
Well, I didn't really create the site to make money, I made it to spread awareness about something and then got distracted. So, the genuine comments are more important to me.

I'll just sift through like 200 comments a day for the rest of my life.
 
I actually just figured out a somewhat better solution (than spending the rest of my life sorting through comments).

In newer versions of Wordpress, it has the "Screen Options" in the top right corner where you can change the amount of comments displayed. So, what I'm doing is displaying a fuck ton, and then sorting by IP address and nuking all comments from spam IP addresses.
 
There is a plugin out there that will bulk change all the links to ones of your own choosing. If interested I will dig out the name of it.
 
Also, I've hit another wall with my above method of loading a fuck ton of comments and marking as spam by IP, because with 1,000 comments, the URL string is too long to be processed by my server unless I do some Apache mod shit I know 0 about.
 
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