Comment spam

MJRevell

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Hi guys,

So my Wordpress site has over 7,000 spam comments held for moderation. Thankfully, they're not appearing on the site because of the Akismet plugin.

Unfortunately, though, there appears to be no way to delete in bulk. Am I missing something?

Would you recommend a different plugin to help stop this?

I really don't want to have to wade through hundreds of pages of comments every week, deleting them in batches of 10 or so...
 
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Forbidden Snowflake

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I have both on my Wordpress interface.

Either bulk action --> delete permanently or on the right side "empty spam"

 

robjvargas

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MJRevell:

Are they pending, or marked as spam? If the latter, Snowflake gave you the best course.

If they're in pending, you would be best off marking them as spam first. Sadly, I think you can only do that 20 at a time. I don't recall a true "select all" option for that. Just one page at a time.
 

MJRevell

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My problem is they're all pending.

I have 20,000 spam comments marked as pending.

The only way I can see to get rid of them is to manually click through every page, marking them as spam in tiny batches... And there are over 1,000 pages to click through.

I'm more tempted to cancel the blog altogether and use a different platform if there are no options to mass delete. Because if I go through 1000 pages to delete these comments, presumably I'll have to do the same thing in a couple of weeks time, again and again...
 

robjvargas

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I opted for Joomla on my site. I'm trying to recall what I did on a WP site I ran for a bit. I'll let you know what I find when I find it.
 

cmhbob

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Mike,

I self-host my blog.

In Jetpack->Akismet, there's a setting near the bottom for Strictness, with two radio buttons. I have mine set to "Silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam so I never see it," and I rarely have anything waiting in my spam queue.

If you're hosting on Wordpress.com, then this bit from the codex might help: http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

I'd personally avoid nuking the blog. That seems extreme. If you do though, make sure you export what's already there, or set up the new one first so you can import everything.
 

Laer Carroll

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You can delete all spam in one step. Go to Comments. Select the Spam tab. The window that comes up has the option Empty Spam. I routinely wait for several dozen of them & use the above procedure to kill them all.

If you don't see the things I see contact Support. Something is wrong, or possibly the theme you use does not have this option. (I use 2010).
 

MJRevell

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You can delete all spam in one step. Go to Comments. Select the Spam tab. The window that comes up has the option Empty Spam. I routinely wait for several dozen of them & use the above procedure to kill them all.

If you don't see the things I see contact Support. Something is wrong, or possibly the theme you use does not have this option. (I use 2010).

My problem is it's not detected they're spam.

All the spam comments are currently "pending", and the spam tab is empty...

The pending tab doesn't have this empty spam option, which is what's getting so frustrating.
 

robjvargas

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Here's a thought: Find a word or fragment that matches just about every comment. For example, "the". Go to Settings, then Discussion, then down to the "Comment Blacklist" text box. Put "the" in there.

The Comment Blacklist is supposed to delete any post that has a blacklisted word in there. But it matches on text. So, for example, "the" will catch "them", "they", "their", and so on.

You may need to set that, then leave for a bit. I'm not sure if that setting will "hit" comments that already exist. But maybe?
 

MJRevell

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Ah, I missed something quite simple.

All I had to do was click "check for spam" on my pending list, and it automatically filters comments into the spam folder. It's doing them in 2-5,000 chunks, which is a fair bit better than manually deleting them!

Thanks for all the help, guys :)