The other day I was faced with the daunting task of having to clear out over 200K spam messages from a blog (don’t worry, dear reader, it wasn’t this blog). This can happen when the blog isn’t properly secured and left to sit for years without regular maintenance, as this particular blog had been.
Usually, if you’ve got lots of spam to remove, you simply check all of the messages and mark them as spam in your wordpress admin panel. In this instance, there were over 1,000 pages worth of spam to go through, and I simply did not have time to do that. Unfortunately, the only other option a simple internet search brought up involved tinkering around with SQL and the back-end database. While I may be a bit of a code-ninja and have some skills in SQL-Fu, in this particular case, that wasn’t going to work for me.
So what do you do if you find yourself on the receiving end of a blog with copious amounts of spam and haven’t got direct access to the PHPmyAdmin panel? Take a deep breath, and download the Bulk Remove Pending Comments Plugin. This nifty little tool will wipe out all of your spammy content in one quick blow. Be warned that you may also be losing some legitimate comments, however in cases in which you’re facing over 1,000 spammy comments, it’s probably going to be worth this kind of hit to your blog.
Once that’s done, make absolutely sure to get your Akismet account set up and running on your blog.
That’s all I have for you this time. Have fun blogging, and remember to keep your site secure!